Biden fails to dismiss censorship collusion lawsuit
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 21, 2023
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) civil rights group has announced that a federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a First Amendment lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, where the government is accused of involvement in censorship.
“The Court finds that the complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by defendants’ arguments to the contrary,” the decision reads.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
The Biden White House thus failed to stop the legal challenge which alleges collusion between the government and Big Tech to suppress information they disapproved of concerning the pandemic and US elections.
The decision not to accept the motion was made in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana by Judge Terry A. Doughty, a statement from the non-profit said.
The NCLA explained that it represented doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, as well as Jill Hines, and that the suit lifted the lid on the censorship regime that the organization says a number of federal agencies had put in place.
The number in question is “at least” 11 agencies and sub-agencies (including the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security, DHS), the NCLA said, and backed this claim up by information that came out during the discovery process.
Government officials are accused of participating in a lawless censorship campaign that used a wide variety of tools to get social media companies to toe the line, from collusion and coordination, to coercion.
These serious claims laid out in the lawsuit, which Judge Doughty just allowed to proceed, further allege that the result was the censoring, blacklisting and shadow-banning of the clients represented by the NCLA, as well as other methods of silencing them, such as deliberately downranking their content, throttling, etc.
Explaining the decision to deny the motion to dismiss, the judge said that, based on past censorship, the threat of future censorship is “substantial” – rather than being “illusory or merely speculative.”
The NCLA welcomed the ruling, describing it as an important victory in the battle for free speech in the US, and lauded the district court for recognizing the scale and damage of government-orchestrated censorship.
“The Court has seen through the government’s unrelenting efforts to deny responsibility for using its vast power to silence thousands upon thousands of Americans online, often removing factually true information the government did not like,” commented NCLA’s senior litigation counsel, John J. Vecchione.
The case is now headed to a preliminary injunction hearing set for May 12.
DHS is sued for records on online election censorship demands
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 25, 2023
Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the agency refused to provide records of communications related to election misinformation flagged by its Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after another agency under the DHS, the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) failed to comply with an FOIA request filed last October.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
Judicial Watch had requested all communications related to EIP’s work sent via Atlassian’s Jira platform between employees and CISA employees and social media companies and other organizations that flagged election misinformation including The Center for Internet Security, the National Association of State Election Directors, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory.
Numerous organizations privately communicated through Jira, according to the lawsuit.
“The Elon Musk ‘Twitter Files’ are the tip of the iceberg, as the federal government ran a massive, secret censorship op against the American people,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That the DHS is hiding these censorship records in violation of FOIA law shows the agency still has something to hide.”
In a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch is suing the DHS for all communications between CISA and EIP, alleging that the agencies were actively flagging content in last year’s midterms. EIP flagged right-leaning news websites, including The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Fox News, The Washington Times, the New York Post, and Just the News.
Logically Unsound
Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023
Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to
- monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
- “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
- outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.
Picture credit: UK Column News
Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.
No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.
HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.
Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.
Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:
- Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
- HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
- HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
- The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.
Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.
It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.
Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.
For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.
All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.
Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.
By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:
“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.
Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base. Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.
For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.
The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?
For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.
The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.
Call to action:
- Please share this article with friends, family and colleagues
- If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for HART’s free regular bulletin here.
- Please read the Big Brother Watch Ministry of Truth report;
- Get active:
- If you have been affected by any of the ‘black ops’ outfits listed above, consider complaining, e.g. to the International Fact-Checking Network: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/complaints-policy
- Consider complaining about Logically.ai’s activities to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
- Write to Logically.ai’s shareholders, which include
- Vitruvian Partners
- Amazon Alexa Fund
- XTX Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of XTC Markets, a leading global algorithmic trading firm, and the
- Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance), managed by Mercia Asset Management PLC.
- The British Business Bank.
These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.
The Twitter Files
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | January 2, 2023
If you’re still under the naively mistaken belief that there is no Deep State, the Twitter file dumps1 from Elon Musk detailing how Twitter, before his acquisition of the company, was coerced into doing the FBI’s bidding, with actual FBI agents on its staff to control the online narrative, ought to set the record straight.
In fact, the lawlessness of our intelligence agencies and the psychological warfare against the American public is far worse than most people ever expected.
FBI paid Twitter huge sums of money — your tax dollars, might I add — to censor certain views and stories, such as the damning Hunter Biden laptop story, which likely would have sunk Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency had it received the attention it legitimately deserved.
The FBI even ran a tabletop exercise about “hacked” information relating to Hunter Biden ONE MONTH before the real story broke. During that exercise, they practiced the narrative (i.e., lies) that weeks later became “official truth.”
There is a Deep State running the show, and they’re doing whatever they damn well please, without regard for the law or the U.S. Constitution. They’re acting completely outside the rules of our Constitutional Republic and the laws of the land, and they’ve weaponized the very agencies that are supposed to protect us and act in the public’s best interest and turned them against us.
The Twitter files saga is expanding by the day, so I won’t be able to cover every last detail here. Books will be needed to cover this scandal in depth. In the meantime, I suggest you review the references cited and keep your eyes peeled for later updates.
FBI Used Twitter to Track and Spy on Americans
In a recent video, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald reviews how Washington has expanded the war state and the Democrat’s censorship regime. About 39 minutes in, he begins reviewing evidence showing the FBI was not only censoring social media content, but the agency was also, on a regular basis, asking Twitter to reveal the location of specific Twitter users — for what purpose, no one knows. As noted by independent journalist Matt Taibbi in a December 17, 2022, Twitter post:
“What ‘law enforcement’ objective is served by asking for Billy Baldwin’s location information? Why is the FBI/DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all? When were these programs created and who approved them?”
These are all good questions. Historically, the FBI’s job has been to monitor and address criminal activity, not “misinformation.” Somewhere along the way, and it’s unclear exactly when the mandate changed and by whom, the DHS/FBI (the FBI supports the DHS by investigating threats) and other agencies tasked themselves with illegally suppressing free speech and shaping public narratives through public-private partnerships with Big Tech.
The Biden administration’s Orwellian “Ministry of Truth,” revealed in the summer of 2022, was one of the first indicators we had that something was horribly amiss. And even though that agency was quickly disbanded after public outcry (and no small amount of mockery), the policing of mis- and disinformation was simply shifted elsewhere within the federal government.
Moreover, as reviewed by Greenwald, internal DHS memos, emails and documents show the DHS has worked on expanding its influence over tech platforms for YEARS. So, government censorship is not something that “just happened” in response to the COVID crisis.
Nor is the censorship limited to COVID or public health information in general. We now have evidence showing the FBI has actively interfered in multiple elections, for example — activity that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) accurately warns is “the biggest threat to our constitutional democracy today.”2
FBI Invented ‘Foreign Interference’ Narrative
Not surprisingly, the FBI invented the narrative that foreign nations were interfering in U.S. elections, which is precisely what they were doing. As reported by Taibbi and attorney Jeff Childers,3 the FBI asked Twitter to investigate “malicious actors” spreading election disinformation on Twitter. Twitter looked into the matter and reported there was no evidence of foreign interference.
The FBI was none too pleased with that answer and made it clear that Twitter better find some. As “evidence” that Twitter’s investigation was flawed, the FBI cited mainstream media articles and think-tank reports that claimed foreign interference was indeed taking place.4
In response, Twitter’s former censorship head Yoel Roth did an about-face and informed the team that “official state propaganda is DEFINITELY A THING ON TWITTER.”
How Media Have Been Weaponized to Provide False Evidence
The FBI’s tactic appears to be a variation of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the “wrap-up smear,” where they leak a lie to the media, and then they use that media report as “evidence” that the lie is true, and it just goes in circles from there.
Here, the FBI used reports — which were based on leaked information from anonymous intelligence agents5 — to pressure Twitter into making something up to further support the fiction the FBI itself invented and leaked to the sources they cited.
As noted by Childers, this variant on the political wrap-up smear is also being used by U.S. health agencies:6
“It’s a nifty trick … The NIH or CDC needs evidence to support some guidance they want to issue, like masking. So they fund some studies intended to show masks work. The pay-for-play scientists publish cartoonish, anti-scientific clown studies ‘proving’ cotton masks can somehow magically filter nanoscale virus particles.
Then the NIH and CDC cite those same studies — the same ones they procured — to ‘recommend’ unconstitutional mask mandates, or even outright order mandates, like for air travel and on cruise ships. Ditto vaccines … It’s a closed loop.”
Twitter-FBI Exercise: Managing the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
We now also have evidence showing it was the FBI that quenched the Hunter Biden laptop story. They, in collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen Institute, even held a tabletop exercise in October 2020 to practice the shaping of the media’s coverage of a potential “hack and dump” operation involving Hunter Biden material.7,8 National security reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post were also in attendance.9 As reported by the New York Post :10
“The exercise by the ‘Aspen Digital Hack-and-Dump Working Group’ involved an 11-day scenario in October 2020 that began with the imaginary release of falsified records related to Hunter Biden’s controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid him as much as $1 million a year to serve on its board when his father was vice president.
‘The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it,’ Shellenberger wrote. But the drill was put into practical use weeks later, when The Post broke the news about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — which was either ignored or downplayed by most mainstream news outlets and suppressed by both Twitter and Facebook.”
In the video below, independent journalist Matt Taibbi speaks with Russell Brand about the Twitter files and the kinds of censorship tactics Twitter secretly engaged in on the government’s behalf.
However, it turns out the FBI didn’t just attempt to sideline the Hunter Biden story a month in advance. No. They’ve been shielding it and working with social media to shield it for them, since 2018. As reported by Childers:11
“In December 2020, Twitter’s former censorship head Yoel Roth explained in a sworn statement that for almost two years leading up to the leak, the FBI told him, over and over, to expect a Russian leak about Hunter Biden in October 2020:
‘During these weekly meetings [since 2018], the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.
I was told in these meetings that … those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter … [and] that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.’ Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made comments on a podcast suggesting he’d had similar conversations with the FBI.”
FBI Agents Assigned to Twitter Censorship Duty
As reported by attorney Jeff Childers,12 FBI field agent Elvis Chan was one of the agents assigned to work with Twitter. He was recently deposed in the Missouri v. Biden case about his role in Twitter’s censoring of Americans. Below is just one of Chan’s emails to Twitter in which he directs them to ban specific accounts for imagined “crimes.”
As noted by Childers:13
“Note that Chan only provided a list of accounts. He didn’t bother to say WHICH terms of service were violated. He didn’t say anybody broke the law. He didn’t even say WHICH tweets were problematic.”
Still, within 48 hours, Twitter had obliged, and the accounts listed by Chan had either been suspended or banned. Below is Twitter censorship employee Patrick Conlon’s reply to Chan. As you can see, a long list of other FBI employees were also carbon copied.
Another FBI “plant” is Jim Baker.14 Before becoming Twitter’s head lawyer, he spent three decades with the FBI, most recently as its Deputy General Counsel. He too used his authority at Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story. While his comment (see email below) may seem innocuous enough — just a polite suggestion — it’s clear, with facts in hand, that Baker was trying to influence the situation.
Intelligence Agencies Have Weaponized Social Media
For the record, Facebook also employs no less than 115 “former” employees of the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies.15 Most of them now work in Facebook’s content moderation department, which seems like a massive career slide, if you ask me, but what do I know? As noted by Childers:16
“The inescapable conclusion of what we’re seeing from the Twitter Files is that our country’s intelligence agencies, by and through the FBI, now control all the large social media outlets … and are using them to manipulate American public opinion and change the outcome of domestic elections. But for whom?”
My answer would be they’re doing it on behalf of the Deep State, the same unelected globalists that so doggedly push for a Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., eugenics rebranded as transhumanism). Childers continues:17
“If Elon Musk hadn’t spent $44 BILLION DOLLARS to buy Twitter, nobody would have ever believed the extent to which the intelligence community has absorbed private social media platforms in this country and turned them against the people. It’s literally unbelievable.
Exposure will probably be fatal. The Constitution does not provide for any internal security service in the United States. The agencies are WAY off the reservation, well into criminal territory, no matter how clever their lawyers are …
Of course, we still have the teensy-weensy little problem of ‘who’ will charge and arrest these people, since they’re in control of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus. Don’t worry, there ARE answers. But let’s wait a little bit and see how things play out.”
FBI Paid Twitter Millions
As mentioned, the FBI was also using taxpayer dollars to pay Twitter for their censorship services — $3,415,323 to be exact, between October 2019 and February 2021 alone.18
FBI and other intelligence agencies were also trying to gain even greater and more direct influence over Twitter. In a January 2020 email, Carlos Monje wrote to Roth, warning that a “sustained effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more information and change our API policies.” Apparently, the FBI wanted direct access into Twitter’s database.19
Lies and More Damn Lies
Investigative journalist Lee Fang with The Intercept 20 has also provided us with some real bombshells. While Twitter has publicly insisted that it was cracking down on ALL covert government propaganda accounts, that was only partially true.
In reality, Twitter worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to promote and protect American propaganda accounts, and aided U.S. intelligence agencies in their efforts to influence foreign governments using fake news, computerized deepfake videos and bots.21 They only hunted down the foreign government-affiliated propaganda accounts. As reported by Fang:22
“Behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used overt identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around two years or more. Some remain active …
In 2017 a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts ‘we use to amplify certain messages.’ The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one and ‘whitelist’ abilities for the others.”
Whitelisted accounts have a “validated” status similar to that of the blue check mark, which ensures they are promoted in searches. These accounts also don’t get shadow-banned or limited by other means. In closing, I think Childers makes an excellent and accurate observation:23
“Combine all this Twitter censorship, influence peddling, and pure propaganda with the vast budget for pushing vaccines by buying scientists and influencers during the pandemic, and we can begin to see the outlines of a vast private market for censorship and fake news created by the deep state, which then became its biggest customer.”
As for the FBI, it released a single-sentence “rebuttal” on December 21, 2022 — on Twitter — to the mountain of scandalous evidence presented against it.24
Sources and References
- 1, 7 Twitter Michael Shellenberger December 19, 2022
- 2 Rumble Glenn Greenwald December 19, 2022 Timestamp: 44:23
- 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13 Coffee & Covid 2022 December 19, 2022
- 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19 Coffee & Covid December 20, 2022
- 9, 10 New York Post December 19, 2022
- 18 Meryl Nass Substack December 20, 2022
- 20, 22 The Intercept December 20, 2022
- 21, 23 Coffee & Covid December 21, 2022
- 24 Coffee & Covid December 22, 2022
U.S. Government Has Been Planning to ‘Lockdown and Wait for a Vaccine’ Since 2007
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 13, 2022
More and more evidence is coming to light that the ‘lockdown and wait for a vaccine’ strategy unleashed in 2020 was being cooked up inside the U.S. Government for decades before COVID-19 appeared and gave too many people an excuse to put the dreadful plan into action.
Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light.
Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged.
The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings “indefinitely”, close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.
During a pandemic, the goal will be to slow the virus’ transmission; delaying the spread of the virus will provide more time for vaccine development while reducing the stress on an already burdened healthcare system.
Here’s the relevant section of the 2007 NIAC plan in full.
2006 and 2007 were a turning point in U.S. biodefence planning. Prior to 2006, such planning had been focused on biological attacks, but after that point major mission creep set in and the new draconian ideas were applied wholesale to general pandemic planning. This controversial switch in focus so riled leading U.S. disease expert D.A. Henderson, who had been involved with the project up to that point, that he issued his famous riposte objecting in the strongest terms to the new ideas. He and his fellow dissenters wrote, presciently:
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.
I’m told by someone who was involved with the programme in the early days that the original biodefence planning in 2002-2003 assumed a targeted biological weapons attack with smallpox as the viral case and anthrax as the bacterial case – both considered worst case scenarios. It was recognised that the old smallpox vaccine was too risky to try to use on a wider population to protect them if such an attack occurred, thus the effort for a new vaccine. But very quickly, within a year or two (not least due to the SARS outbreak in 2003), there was a massive expansion of the original mission and suddenly every infectious agent, whether dangerous or not, was cast into the web of biodefence.
Outside the U.S. there was more resistance to this kind of totalitarian nonsense. However, even the 2019 World Health Organisation pandemic guidance bears many of its marks. While this guidance commendably did not recommend “in any circumstances” contact tracing, border closures, entry and exit screening and quarantine of exposed individuals, it did make conditional recommendations for use of face masks by the public, school and workplace closures and “avoiding crowding” i.e., social distancing.
The purpose was also the same: to ‘flatten the curve’ to wait for a vaccine, as illustrated in the diagram below. The WHO guidance states: “NPIs are often the most accessible interventions, because of the time it takes to make specific vaccines available”; “specific vaccines may not be available for the first six months”; NPIs are “used to delay the peak of the epidemic… allowing time for vaccines to be distributed”.
These untested ideas, which the WHO’s own guidance rightly admitted had no good quality evidence to support them, have now become a terrible orthodoxy for global pandemic response. This is despite them utterly failing to achieve any of their goals – a point that no one who backs them seems to have noticed.
Somehow, the world must learn the right lessons from this debacle. Yet it keeps threatening to learn all the wrong ones.
Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022
Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.
In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”
CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.
Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.
Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).
Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate. New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”
But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.
In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”
Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”
The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”
How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”
But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.
The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”
“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
Department of Homeland Security CISA
US Government Office of Medical Censorship and Propaganda
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | November 11, 2022
The US Department of Homeland Security (HSA) is conducting medical censorship while hiding in plain sight. The website for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has resources to engage vigilante “disinformation” police to assist HSA in their mission of silencing opinions on COVID-19 and pandemic response. The main stated target is disinformation defined as information deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country. Their toolkit allows any user to use “products” and tailor them with official logos to spread the government propagandized message:[i]
“COVID-19 DISINFORMATION TOOLKIT
These Toolkit resources are designed to help State, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) officials bring awareness to misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing online related to COVID-19’s origin, scale, government response, prevention and treatment. Each product was designed to be tailored with local government websites and logos.
Download and share these resources—talking points, FAQs, outreach graphics, and posters—to help spread awareness.”
The toolkit directs well-intended users to use images, talking points, and documents to deliver a message. There is only ONE source of trusted information — you guessed it — state and local agencies who rely upon the CDC!
So, the picture is becoming more clear on how the US government operationalized a propaganda campaign on its own people from the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. They took these steps:
1) establish a single source of truth — the CDC,
2) weaponize CISA to declare “disinformation” their target,
3) enlist a legion of volunteer deputies without any official authority or accountability to operate within social media and all walks of life, giving public service messages telling Americans the CDC is the only trusted source of information. The converse of this assertion–anything else must be considered untrue and up for being nailed as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.”
Don’t be surprised if FOIA-obtained documents demonstrate CISA and CDC were operating as partners in established campaigns with social media, mainstream television, print media, corporations, schools, and every aspect of life. Nothing can be more dangerous to public health. Directing all trust to a single source of medical information that is not contemporary, has no regular schedule of review or public briefings, is not transparent with data (e.g., the withheld V-Safe dataset), and has woefully lagged on major scientific developments (contagion control, testing, vaccine safety).
It’s a mind-blowing reality that our government agencies, in a planned and coordinated manner, have operationalized a plan to control information and spread propaganda in order to influence behavior. They pitted agencies against citizens and individuals against one another and set social media as the main battleground. The CDC and DHS CISA should be prime targets of US Senate and Congressional Investigations into our disastrous pandemic response.
[i] DHS CISA Publication: “We’re in This Together. Disinformation Stops With You.”
Fauci forced to testify on social media censorship
Samizdat | October 22, 2022
The White House’s chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci, and other senior officials are set to be deposed under oath as part of a lawsuit claiming the government worked alongside social media platforms to create a “massive censorship enterprise” throughout the Covid-19 outbreak.
In a Friday ruling, Judge Terry Doughty granted a joint request from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to compel several current and former officials to testify in the suit, among them Fauci, ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and two high-level figures from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the [Joe] Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt said in a statement. “It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth.”
While the defense insisted that senior officials can only be called to testify about their actions in office under “extraordinary circumstances,” Judge Doughty said the personnel in question met that standard. He added that the two GOP-led states “have proven that Dr. Fauci has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to Covid-19,” ordering him to cooperate with a deposition.
Requests to depose the other officials were granted on similar grounds, as the judge concluded all either held direct meetings with social media firms about the purported censorship, or had close knowledge of those discussions.
Jen Easterly, who heads up the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was also ordered to testify. She played a “central role” in “flagging misinformation to social-media companies for censorship,” the plaintiffs argued, describing the cyber agency the “nerve center” of “the federal government’s efforts to censor social media users.” The same official was said to be involved in the DHS’ now-defunct ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ – dubbed the ‘Ministry of Truth’ by critics – which would have created a new mechanism to facilitate cooperation between the White House and social media sites.
Initially filed last May by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lawsuit claims the federal government encouraged online platforms to censor, delete or ban certain speech about the pandemic, including discussion of the “lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origin,” as well as questions about the effectiveness of face masks, vaccines or lockdown policies, among other issues. The two AGs have largely relied on documents obtained through subpoenas of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook’s parent firm Meta, which detail regular communications between the government and social media sites.
The White House, as well as the eight officials ordered to testify, have yet to comment on Friday’s ruling. The depositions must take place within 30 days of the order, though it remains unclear whether the defense intends to appeal the decision.
DHS is spending millions to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | October 5, 2022
Despite shutting down its “Disinformation Governance Board” after First Amendment violation concerns, the United States (US) Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still handing out millions in grants in order to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “conspiracy theories.”
The DHS has previously claimed that online misinformation is a terror threat and these grants were made in a similar vein and doled out as part of a “Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program.”
In total, over $3 million of taxpayer money was handed over to universities, think tanks, and nonprofits who will use the money to fund projects that fight what they deem to be misinformation and disinformation.
The University of Rhode Island was given $701,612 for its “Media Literacy and Online Critical Thinking Initiatives” and “Youth Resilience Programs.” The description for this grant claims that “disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda have become large-scale social problems” and says that part of the funds from the grant will be used for “online and face-to-face dialogues [that] help demonstrate how to critically analyze propaganda, disinformation, and domestic extremism.”
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a quasi-government entity and think tank that produces research that informs public policy, was granted $750,000 for its “Raising Societal Awareness,” “Civic Engagement,” and “Media Literacy and Online Critical Thinking” initiatives. The grant will be used to “develop an educational digital game and supportive materials for educating students in secondary schools in Northeast Washington Educational Service District 101 (ESD 101) in Washington State on disinformation.” The game and its learning program will “help students understand different strategies used to spread disinformation by malignant actors” and provide “a hands-on learning experience around strategies and policies to combat disinformation at the institutional level.”
The Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication was awarded $592,598 for an “extended reality” (XR) project which covers virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. The grant description claims that “terrorist recruiters and violent extremists will “most certainly target new forms of technology for their efforts to spread conspiracy theories, air grievances, and to craft misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” The project will create and test “Media Literacy interventions focused on Harmful Information in virtual spaces, to inform the prevention of extremism and violent content in the metaverse.”
The nonprofit International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) was given $750,000 to “inculcate resilience against the spread of disinformation and its divisive effects by making faith actors a part of the solution.” Tech company Moonshot will provide insights on “specific trends around disinformation and the spread of violence inciting narratives.” This data will be used by the ICRD to design workshops that build “societal resilience” where communities can “evaluate the meaning of religious disinformation for their future.”
The Carter Center, a nongovernmental nonprofit founded by former President Jimmy Carter, was awarded $99,372 for “Media Literacy and Online Critical Thinking Initiatives.” As part of these initiatives, The Carter Center will partner with Syracuse University to “demonstrate the effectiveness of its media literacy curriculum in mitigating the harms presented by dis-, misinformation.” Through this partnership, The Carter Center intends to roll out its curriculum modules in multiple classroom settings and target a wide population aged 18-60. The description for this grant claims that media literacy trainings build capacities in “recognizing false and misleading information.”
Lewis University was given $157,707 for “Media Literacy and Online Critical Thinking Initiatives.” It plans to use some of this grant money to “maintain and improve” its H2I (How2Inform) website which currently consists of content it says is “helpful in combating misinformation.” The description for this grant claims that “free tools and resources will be provided equitably to communities within the state to help combat online misinformation.”
The DHS awarded these misinformation and disinformation grants last month alongside another $699,763 grant to Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) which was given to study “extremism” in gaming.
In addition to awarding grants, the DHS recently claimed that “radicalized” Americans who believe “false narratives” online are the new terror threat and has pushed for the continuance of its disinformation work.
Fauci’s Red Guards: Lawsuit Reveals Vast Federal Censorship Army
By Michael P Senger | The New Normal | September 2, 2022
One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb?
The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good—regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.
One of history’s great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As László Ladány recalled, Mao’s decades-long campaign to remold the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War.
By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organized lynchings and public executions. These grim liturgies followed set patterns that once more were reminiscent of gangland practices: during these proceedings, rhetorical questions were addressed to the crowd, which, in turn, had to roar its approval in unison—the purpose of the exercise being to ensure collective participation in the murder of innocent victims; the latter were selected not on the basis of what they had done, but of who they were, or sometimes for no better reason than the need to meet the quota of capital executions which had been arbitrarily set beforehand by the Party authorities. From that time on, every two or three years, a new “campaign” would be launched, with its usual accompaniment of mass accusations, “struggle meetings,” self-accusations, and public executions… Remolding the minds, “brainwashing” as it is usually called, is a chief instrument of Chinese communism, and the technique goes as far back as the early consolidation of Mao’s rule in Yan’an.
This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as China’s dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Mao’s enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their country’s own history, demolishing China’s relics en masse.
Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies.
Until now. As it turns out, an astonishing new release of discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden—in which NCLA Legal is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covid—reveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.
Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.
The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.
The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. And it rises to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, including numerous White House officials… In their initial response to interrogatories, Defendants initially identified forty-five federal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all within only two federal agencies, DHS and HHS), who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation and censorship.
Federal officials are coordinating to censor private speech across all major social media platforms.
The third-party social-media platforms, moreover, have revealed that more federal agencies are involved. Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials—including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the White House—have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants. YouTube disclosed eleven federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants. Twitter disclosed nine federal officials, including senior officials at the State Department who were not previously disclosed by Defendants.
Federal officials are granted privileged status by social media companies for the purpose of censoring speech on their platforms, and officials hold weekly meetings on what to censor.
These federal bureaucrats are deeply embedded in a joint enterprise with social-media companies to procure the censorship of social-media speech. Officials at HHS routinely flag content for censorship, for example, by organizing weekly “Be On The Lookout” meetings to flag disfavored content, sending lengthy lists of examples of disfavored posts to be censored, serving as privileged “fact checkers” whom social-media platforms consult about censoring private speech, and receiving detailed reports from social-media companies about so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation” activities online, among others.
Social media companies have even set up secret, privileged channels to give federal officials expedited means to censor content on their platforms.
For example, Facebook trained CDC and Census Bureau officials on how to use a “Facebook misinfo reporting channel.” Twitter offered federal officials a privileged channel for flagging misinformation through a “Partner Support Portal.” YouTube has disclosed that it granted “trusted flagger” status to Census Bureau officials, which allows privileged and expedited consideration of their claims that content should be censored.
Many suspected that some coordination between social media companies and the federal government was occurring, but the breadth, depth, and coordination of this apparatus is far beyond what virtually anyone imagined. And the scale of this censorship apparatus raises troubling questions.
How could so many federal officials be convinced to engage in the clandestine censorship of opposition to tin-pot public health policies from China which have killed tens of thousands of young Americans and—let’s be honest—were never really that popular to begin with? The answer, I believe, is that high-level White House officials such as Anthony Fauci must have been simultaneously threatening social media companies if they did not comply with federal censorship demands, while also threatening entire federal bureaucracies if they did not toe the Party line.
By simultaneously threatening both the federal bureaucracy and social media companies, a handful of high-level officials could effectively transform the federal government into a sprawling censorship army reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards, silencing any opposition to tin-pot public health policies with increasing detachment and certitude as this systematic silencing falsely convinced them that the regime’s policies were just and good. A few of these federal employees must have eventually let slip to the Republicans that this jawboning was taking place, which appears to have been how this suit began.
In plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty’s words:
Hyperbole and exaggeration have been common features on both sides of covid policy disputes. But I can say with all soberness and circumspection (and you, kind readers, will correct me if I am wrong here): this evidence suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal government’s executive branch in US history.
Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
DHS wants to continue its “disinformation” work, flag “falsehoods” to social media platforms
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 29, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was recently shut down after First Amendment concerns but the DHS seemingly still intends to continue its “disinformation” work.
A recent report from the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s “Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee” states that while “there is no need for a separate Disinformation Governance Board… the Department must be able to address the disinformation threat streams that can undermine the security of our homeland.”
The report was produced after DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asked the subcommittee to make recommendations for how the DHS can “most effectively and appropriately address disinformation that poses a threat to the homeland while protecting civil rights and providing greater transparency across this work.”
In the report, the subcommittee provides a broad definition of disinformation, outlines how the DHS detects and mitigates information that falls under the scope of this definition, and provides the subcommittee’s recommendations.
The far-reaching definition of disinformation includes both deliberate and unintentional spreading of “falsehoods.” The subcommittee also deems the “intentional spreading of genuine information with the intent to cause harm” to be a form of disinformation and uses “moving private and personal information into the public sphere” as an example of this type of disinformation.
The report outlines how several US government agencies that fall under the DHS’s purview, including the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), surveil online messages, forums, and social media to identify disinformation, “rumors,” and “attitudes related to migration.”
It also notes that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which also falls under the purview of the DHS, flags “disinformation campaigns utilizing social media” to social media companies “for whatever action those companies see fit to take.”
In the recommendations section of the report, the subcommittee insists that the DHS’s work on disinformation is “critical” and that the DHS “needs the ability to identify, analyze, and, where necessary, address certain incorrect information.”
The subcommittee adds that the DHS should be able to flag disinformation to social media platforms:
“The Department can and should also bring such disinformation to the attention of other government agencies for appropriate action and to platforms hosting the falsehoods. It is for the platforms, alone, to determine whether any action is appropriate under their policies.”
While the report recommends that the DHS should maintain its broad powers to surveil disinformation and flag it to social media platforms, the subcommittee insists that these activities will be “consistent with the law and the relevant civil rights and privacy protections.”
We obtained a copy of this Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee report for you here.
We obtained a copy of the appendix to this report (which contains examples of DHS products and activities that address disinformation) for you here.
This report and its recommendations were published on the same day that the DHS officially shut down its Disinformation Governance Board. This board was introduced in April but days after it was introduced, 20 states threatened legal action and branded it an “unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment on every citizen’s right to express his or her opinions, engage in political debate, and disagree with the government.”
While the DHS’s activities related to the Disinformation Governance Board generated mass controversy, the DHS was surveilling “misinformation” and accused of surveilling money transfers before the board was even introduced. It also has contracted with a social media surveillance company that provides surveillance software.
The recommendation that the DHS should flag alleged disinformation to social media was published one day before the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) use of this tactic in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election came under fresh scrutiny.
The scrutiny began after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast and said the FBI had warned Facebook about a “dump” of “Russian disinfo” just before the New York Post published a story alleging that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden had engaged in an alleged corruption scandal. This story was published a few weeks before the 2020 US presidential election and was censored by Facebook and other Big Tech platforms. At the time, many politicians and journalists blasted Big Tech for censoring a story that was unfavorable to then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. A recent poll found that 79% of Americans who followed the story believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
Government agencies, such as the DHS and the FBI, defend this practice of flagging alleged disinformation to social media companies by insisting that they’re not directing the companies to censor and that it’s up to the platforms to decide whether they want to remove the information that’s flagged to them.
However, internal chats have revealed that when government agencies or officials flag information or accounts to platforms, they do sometimes apply pressure. For example, recently released internal Slack messages show Twitter employees discussing the White House branding journalist Alex Berenson “the epicenter of disinfo” and questioning “why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform” four months before he was banned.
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When Trump’s NIH pulled Peter Daszak’s grant to Wuhan in April 2020, the pushback was unimaginable
77 Nobel laureates begged NIH to give it back. So did 31 different “scientific societies” — see an article in SCIENCE magazine, the journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science
By Meryl Nass | March 28, 2023
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