FBI Contractor Created Fake Online IDs to Join Chatrooms Run by Groups Organizing Against Vaccine Mandates
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 12, 2023
An FBI surveillance contractor infiltrated the chatrooms of two airline industry groups opposed to vaccine mandates to collect intelligence on the groups’ organizing activities, investigative journalist Lee Fang reported.
The contractor, Flashpoint, which in the past infiltrated Islamic terror groups, now focuses on “anti-vaccine” groups and other domestic political organizations, according to Fang.
In a webinar presentation for clients last year, which Fang analyzed on his Substack, Flashpoint analyst Vlad Cuiujuclu demonstrated his company’s methods for identifying and entering encrypted Telegram chat groups.
He explained how the company attempted to join chatrooms of transportation workers resisting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Fang described the presentation:
“‘In this case, we’re searching for a closed channel of U.S. Freedom Flyers,’ said Cuiujuclu. ‘It’s basically a group that opposed vaccination and masks.’
“As he clicked through a database, Cuiujuclu showed a chat group on Telegram sponsored by Airline Professionals For Justice, another group formed by airline industry workers opposed to the mandate. The forum, he added, provided useful insights, including Zoom links for meetings of the grassroots organization.
“‘Private chats,’ said Cuiujuclu, ‘require for you to have an invite link,’ which he noted can often either be found by scrolling through public forums or by ‘engag[ing] the admin of that channel.’”
Flashpoint also offers clients artificial intelligence and internet scraping tools.
According to Fang, the firm is a leader in the “threat intelligence industry,” a growing number of security and surveillance firms that create fake online identities to infiltrate Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums and dark web message boards to gather information for clients, including corporations and the FBI, to monitor potential threats.
Joshua Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers, said he is aware that Flashpoint infiltrated private chat groups associated with his organization.
Yoder told The Defender :
“Tradecraft and other strategies are often used to gain inside knowledge of conservative organizations with the intent to disrupt, mislead and otherwise thwart effective campaigns.
“Infiltration is a tactic used by the deep state to prevent the truth from being told by attempting to destroy the advancement of the message. The team at US Freedom Flyers has been successful in recognizing these attacks and we have taken decisive actions to protect the organization and our members.”
Aviation industry workers were some of the most vocal and organized against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
They wrote an open letter to the aviation industry signed by thousands of organizations, physicians and pilots. They also organized research on the risks of vaccines for pilots, spoke publicly about the “culture of fear and intimidation” around the mandates in the industry, and filed multiple lawsuits in Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.S.
US Freedom Flyers brought a lawsuit against Atlas Air, one of the largest air cargo carriers in the aviation industry, in May 2022.
Fang told The Defender the targeting of American citizens resisting the vaccine mandates fits into a long history of surveillance being used to subvert democracy. He said:
“There is a long sordid history of informants and surveillance contractors working to undermine democratic engagement in this country.
“The push against regular citizens opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates has come in many forms: censorship, demonization and in this case, surveillance.”
The growing market for spying on domestic dissent
Flashpoint advertises its surveillance success on its website, providing examples of its work undermining environmental activism, G20 protests and protests against the aviation industry.
The webpages describing these activities were taken down after Fang published his investigation, but they can be found on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
For example, Flashpoint described its capacity to monitor activists organizing against pollution and the aviation industry. The website said:
“By monitoring the situation and assessing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP’s), Flashpoint was able to assess the impact of upcoming protests, and determine that these groups would likely continue to protest and attempt to impede airport construction and expansion projects through direct action. …
“Based on this information, Flashpoint customers were able to take actions to help control the impact to business operations, and to ensure the safety of their employees and facilities as well as the safety of those protesting.”
Flashpoint was founded by Evan Kohlmann, former NBC News contributor who investigated Islamic terror groups and whom The Intercept described as “the U.S. government’s go-to expert witness in terrorism prosecutions.”
Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry, a group that researches the surveillance industry, told Fang that “Flashpoint has been selling its chatroom infiltration services to companies and governments for years.”
But, he said, it has shifted its focus from “surveilling Muslims after September 11” and “followed the money into both the Pentagon’s information warfare programs and the business of monitoring domestic protest groups.”
Last year, Flashpoint acquired Echosec Systems, another intelligence contractor, and last month it formalized a partnership with Google Cloud.
These acquisitions come in addition to “a steady stream of contracts to Flashpoint in recent years from the FBI, the Department of Defense, Treasury Department, and Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies,” Fang wrote.
Fang also spoke to Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Bhattacharya said:
“This kind of domestic spying violates the implicit protection Americans have in these kinds of settings.
“This isn’t terrorism, this doesn’t have anything to do with national security.
“This is a private set of employees, workers who are trying to maintain their jobs in the face of unscientific demands for COVID vaccinations.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
An Open Letter to Ella Irwin, Head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety (and Censorship) Department
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory, Inc. | May 7, 2023
The following is an open letter to Ella G. Irwin, Head of Twitter Trust and Safety, and Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, and anyone else at Twitter, Inc. who is responsible for censoring political speech and defaming people with fake “advisory” labels, among other such “visibility-filtering” tactics.
I am publishing it as an open letter, not to bore everyone to death with my personal problems, but because the censorship and defamation I have suffered at the hands of Twitter for at least two years is an example of how the decentralized network of global corporations, Intelligence agencies, governments, non-governmental governing entities, “anti-disinformation” outfits, and other parties that together comprise what Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex” are evolving into an Orwellian Ministry-of-Truth-type apparatus “with the power to control the information environment in ways that determine what people believe to be true and what is false.”
Twitter, Inc. has been censoring my political commentary and maliciously defaming me (i.e., damaging my reputation and income as an author) for approximately two years. Twitter has been doing this by concealing the Tweets of my “Consent Factory” account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels, deceiving Twitter users into believing I have been tweeting content depicting “adult nudity and sexual behavior,” or “excessively gory content, sexual violence and/or assault, bestiality or necrophilia.” Twitter’s actions have damaged both my book sales and my reputation, globally. Defamation is a tort. I could sue the corporation for damages in several jurisdictions.
I have no interest in doing that, currently. What I do want, however, is a real explanation of why and exactly how Twitter, Inc. censored and defamed me for approximately two years. I want this explanation — a real explanation with documentation, not self-serving corporate-speak — not for personal reasons, primarily, but because I believe people need to be able to understand how powerful corporations like Twitter (and Facebook, and Google, and all the other entities and parties I mentioned above) are “visibility filtering” our collective reality.
The fact that these powerful corporations (and other entities) are doing this, not just on the macro level, but also on the micro level, to writers like me, who, let’s face it, are not exactly world-famous “influencers,” and to “non-public persons” who are basically just using social media to talk to their friends, does not bode well for the future of our societies. This kind of micro-perception-manipulation, this “visibility filtering” of our collective reality, goes way beyond traditional censorship. It is a hallmark of all totalitarian systems, which attempt to control, not only what people say, but what they think, how they think, how they perceive events, and facts, and each other.
Totalitarian systems do not spring into being fully formed. They develop slowly, gradually, unrecognized at first, and then ignored, usually until it is too late. We do not recognize the formation of new totalitarian systems because we are forever looking backwards instead of forwards, preparing for the storm that has passed, expecting history to repeat, rather than rhyme. Blinded by hindsight, we do not recognize the monster that is taking shape right in front of us. We glimpse a claw here, a tooth there, the flash of a pitiless blue eye, but fail to assemble the bits into an image of the beast entire, until it is inexorably upon us.
Anyway, here’s my open letter … one more bit, for the record.
To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc.
cc: Elon Musk
Dear Ms. Irwin,
This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3, 2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my @consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult content” labels for approximately two years.
First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.
Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the @consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:
(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:
Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism, and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”) in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.
In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”
(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from 2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being and/or has been “filtered.”
(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.
There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian, or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet. Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory, “interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these “interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole proprietors.
That’s it for my questions, for now.
Again, thank you for finally putting an end to the defamation that Twitter, Inc. has been subjecting me to, for the last two years. I must say, it is a bit disappointing that it took a happenstance encounter on Twitter to connect with someone with the power to do that. Frankly, given Mr. Musk’s initial and ongoing publicity campaign to portray himself as a champion of free speech, and a stalwart opponent of censorship, and Twitter under his leadership as the antipode of “old, bad, censorship-happy Twitter,” I had expected that immediate steps would be taken to … you know, stop deceiving people, and maliciously defaming people, and manipulating the “visibility” of political views according to some unarticulated ideological schema, but I guess these things take time.
I look forward to your substantive response to the above questions.
Very truly yours,
C. J. Hopkins
P.S. Should you happen to run into Mr. Musk there at Twitter HQ, you might also want to suggest that he resume providing access to the “Twitter Files” to reporters like Matt and Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag (if I can put a word in for her). Doing so would demonstrate that the “Twitter Files” thing was not just a limited hangout, and a PR stunt designed to whitewash the company and kill public interest in the nefarious activities of Twitter, Inc., and other powerful global corporations, and their partners at the FBI, DHS, whatever that CIS or CISA acronym stands for, and … well, you know, “other agencies.”
Ukraine working with FBI to censor social media – official
RT | April 28, 2023
Ukrainian intelligence has partnered with the FBI and other US government agencies to remove ‘Russian’ content on Silicon Valley platforms, a senior official told independent journalist Lee Fang earlier this week at the RSA Convention in San Francisco.
“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” Ilya Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), told Fang.
Vitiuk spoke at the cyber security conference, sitting on a panel alongside FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran, Special Agent Alex Kobzanets from the San Francisco field office, and Laura Galante from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Fang noted that the Ukrainian official thanked the many “private sector allies” in the US, including Google, Amazon, Starlink, and CrowdStrike – the DNC contractor that claimed ‘Russian hacking’ in 2016 but later testified it had no evidence for it.
“I don’t know how many times we’ve called the CEOs here in San Francisco to drive to their office on a Sunday afternoon and really engage with our Ukrainian partners,” Kobzanets said during the panel.
According to Vitiuk, the SBU tells the FBI that a certain person or account is “probably Russia’s influence” in order to get them censored. He described the FBI as his agency’s “top partner” and US cyber support as a “psychological game changer” for Ukraine.
“Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not,” Vitiuk told Fang when asked how the SBU determines what might be disinformation. “Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”
By way of example, Vitiuk cited reports of tensions between President Vladimir Zelensky and Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, saying they were completely fabricated by Russia. In early March, the openly pro-Ukraine German tabloid Bild reported on their disagreements about military tactics.
Fang has previously documented US government plans to work with social media platforms on censoring “disinformation” related to “the nature of US support to Ukraine.” In December, he also revealed that the Pentagon had teamed up with Twitter to “amplify certain messages” for the US military.
Government agencies are subpoenaed for documents on social media censorship collusion
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 29, 2023
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, has sent subpoenas to the heads of three federal agencies for records on communications with social media companies to censor online content.
Jordan sent the subpoenas to head of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) head Jen Easterly, State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) coordinator James Rubin, and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
We obtained an example of one of the letters for you here.
The subpoenas are part of the efforts to reveal the collusion between the federal government and social media to censor certain viewpoints.
“Numerous documents made publicly available reflect the weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online directly and by proxy,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Dr. Walensky. (Documents obtained in the lawsuit filed by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general against the Biden administration and the Twitter Files published by Matt Taibbi and other independent journalists have shown that officials at several federal agencies, including the FBI and DHS, constantly contacted social media companies to have certain people and content censored.)
“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which the CDC coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies in order to censor speech.”
Jordan sent all three agencies letters to produce the records, but they failed to adequately provide the records requested. The subpoenas are an attempt to force them to produce all the records required.
All three agencies have until May 22 to provide the records.
Spy letter about Hunter Biden shows how Dems are undermining democracy
By James Bovard | April 21, 2023
In the closing address at last month’s Summit for Democracy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken piously proclaimed, “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident.
“It requires constant effort.”
Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters.
The House Judiciary Committee revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign.
Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign.
In the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, Joe Biden invoked that letter from former intelligence officials to deflect Donald Trump’s attacks on Biden family corruption.
Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.
Biden pretended that letter arose spontaneously from the patriotic sentiments of former officials.
But the letter was “triggered” by Blinken’s call to Morell, who then contacted his former colleagues.
Blinken’s ploy may have swayed Biden to appoint him secretary of state.
The media are mostly ignoring or downplaying the revelations of Blinken’s machinations.
If the roles were reversed, cable news and front-page headlines would be screaming about a villainous Trump operative pulling official strings to whitewash the Donald.
MSNBC would be howling about the death of democracy, and CNN hosts would be sobbing hysterically about the dirty deal.
But when Team Biden does it: nothing to see here, move along.
How many presidential elections can Democrats seek to dishonestly rig without suffering any penalty flags from media scorekeepers?
Shortly before the 2016 election, senior Hillary Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan peddled false claims linking the Trump Organization to Russia.
The Federal Election Commission last month levied a $113,000 fine on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier.
The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election.
There was no proof — but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Jake Sullivan is now Biden’s national security adviser.
Did he get that gig in part because of his willingness to lie for Democratic kingpins?
Avril Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence.
Did signing the Hunter laptop letter help her snare that plum job?
The letter Blinken finagled would not have been so influential if journalists were not shamelessly docile to federal job titles.
Inside the Beltway, former intelligence kingpins are viewed like royalty or at least second-tier aristocracy.
But the CIA has a long record of secretly intervening in dozens of foreign elections.
In 2019, former CIA director Mike Pompeo summarized his agency’s motif: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”
Former CIA chief James Woolsey insisted in 2018 that the CIA intervenes in elections “only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.”
Yet the letter from former spooks was instantly revered by journalists as if it were handed down from Mt. Sinai.
For the Washington political elite, defeating Donald Trump was the ultimate good cause to save democracy.
Biden talks as if his 2020 election victory was the result of practically a divine incarnation of the “will of the people.”
Unfortunately, presidential elections are irrevocable regardless of how many voters were conned.
How much official deceit can democracy survive?
Any notion of “informed consent” by voters is a mirage if federal agencies and former officials have the power to endlessly distort the news.
Shortly after he became secretary of state, Blinken boasted that the US government doesn’t sweep problems “under the rug. . . . We deal with them in the daylight, with full transparency.”
That pledge apparently did not extend to Blinken’s own tampering with the 2020 election.
What else is Blinken hiding, and when will the next shoe fall?
Jewish Organizations Are Close To Legally Ending Free Speech On The Internet
By Joseph Jordan | National Justice Party | April 19, 2023
The Supreme Court is currently authoring its opinion on Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, an enormously consequential decision that could radically change how we use the internet.
The decision, which could be released any time from now to July due to the complex and politically fraught nature of the case, has pit several Jewish organizations against a dwindling number of civil liberties groups willing to defend the Constitutional right to free speech.
The case combines Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, two lawsuits which assert that social media platforms are legally liable for acts of violence committed by groups or individuals that utilize their services to promote their ideas.
SCOTUS’ decision to grant certiorari to Gonzalez shows the immense political pull Zionist groups — foreign and domestic — have inside the American system.
Gonzalez is a brazen display of foreign interference by an Israeli NGO called Shurat HaDin, which seeks to challenge the standing of Section 230 in the name of Nohemi Gonzalez, a California exchange student who was killed during a 2015 ISIS terrorist attack in Paris.
Shurat HaDin has made strategic lawsuits seeking to undermine American laws protecting free speech its central cause, though previous attempts by the group to attack Section 230 have been dismissed or defeated in courts. The Supreme Court typically reserves certiorari for cases with mixed rulings, but they have made a special exception for Gonzalez, which was defeated in lower courts and beaten again in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The argument in Taamneh is similar to Gonzalez, though this case is being argued in the name of a Jordanian national who was killed in a 2017 Islamic State attack in Turkey. Taamneh was able to achieve victory in the same Ninth Circuit court, which curiously ignored Section 230 in Twitter’s case and instead found them liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Twitter’s relative tolerance for free speech compared to the Jewish-owned Google monopoly in the biased Ninth Circuit is likely to have played a role in the creation of drastically different rulings on similar facts.
Amicus briefs in these Supreme Court proceedings have brought together a united Jewish front against the First Amendment. The Zionist Organization of America, which supports Gonzalez, is playing the role of “bad cop” on Google, while other Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League are staying “neutral” in the case, stating that any ruling should merely encourage the company to continue its good work engaging in strict censorious and editorializing practices against right-wing speech. Google put content moderation in the hands of the ADL as early as 2017, though the Zionist lobbyists have still complained that current technology is not thorough enough when it comes to censoring their political opponents on Youtube.
On the Twitter leg, the landscape is different, with Jewish litigants showing far less patience by unleashing a furious legal onslaught attacking the company.
The Zachor Legal Institute, American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Simon Wiesenthal Center and others are arguing that Twitter and other social media companies deliberately and knowingly recruit for violent terrorists and are thus responsible for the harm caused by the activities of criminal users.
The ADL’s amicus brief reiterates many of these points, but with supplements generated through its questionable in-house data collection practices, where the Jews cite themselves as an authoritative source supporting the idea that Twitter and Youtube are co-conspirators in the financing and spread of terrorism. The filing goes after the real target of these lawsuits by emphasizing the supposed availability of “white supremacist” content on social media platforms to make its point.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed in favor of leaving Section 230 untouched, explaining that even the most advanced algorithms can’t always distinguish between illegal calls to imminent violence and First Amendment protected content, thus opening up infinite possibilities for crippling litigation. In its public statement, the EFF wrote that “if the plaintiffs in these cases convince the Court to narrow the legal interpretation of Section 230 and increase platforms’ legal exposure for generally knowing harmful material is present on their services, the significant protections that Congress envisioned in enacting this law would be drastically eroded.”
So far, SCOTUS’ engagement with this case has exposed the limitations of having a small group of judges do work that is the responsibility of the US Congress. The consensus among legal observers on the oral argument phase of this case, which was streamed, is that the justices were flustered and confused. SCOTUS judges have even admitted that they are out of their depth, while previous supporters of altering Section 230 like Clarence Thomas appeared much more tepid on the question as of late.
Experts believe that the Supreme Court is leaning in favor of keeping Section 230, though this view should be questioned. If SCOTUS wants to keep the status quo, why did they agree to hear this case in the first place?
Watching First Amendment safeguards for online speech being debated, and thus threatened, could further encourage companies already engaging in widespread censorship. Virtually all major social media companies already have FBI operatives controlling their speech compliance departments, making the private-public distinctions being discussed farcical.
Even if big tech is able to escape from this case unscathed, the willingness of our judicial system to entertain repealing Section 230 will strongly accelerate the ongoing campaign to suppress journalists, erode free thought and interfere in the open exchange of ideas even further.
No matter what SCOTUS’ final verdict looks like, the era of unprecedented freedom to think, read and believe what we want that the internet once provided is never coming back.
FBI targeting Russians on Facebook
RT | April 9, 2023
The FBI has launched a social media campaign seeking to convince Russian nationals to provide sensitive information about the activities of their home country’s authorities, Fox News reported on Friday. The ad, which was first posted in February, was said to have been appearing on Twitter, Facebook and Google.
“Do you want to change your future?” Alan Kohler, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, says in the video shared online. “The FBI values you. The FBI can help you. But only you have the power to take the first step.”
Fox News cited a source as saying that, although the Bureau has run ads targeting Russians in the past, this year it decided that “a video was more effective.”
The FBI’s website encourages Russians willing to offer information to visit the bureau’s main office in Washington, DC, to call the FBI hotline, or to send a message online.
The US stepped up efforts to recruit informants in recent years as Moscow and Washington have been locked in a diplomatic row over Ukraine. In 2019, the Bureau posted a series of ads on Facebook, urging Russians to come forward, although this message, written in Russian, contained typos.
In 2020, the FBI’s online campaign aimed at potential Russian informants included images of popular Soviet actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, known for portraying a police detective on screen. The CIA, meanwhile, has been publishing job postings for people who speak Russian.
Contract shows how the FBI purchases massive amounts of online data
Something the FBI only recently admitted to
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 30, 2023
The FBI was a customer of a private company Team Cymru, a contract shows. The company is in the business of harvesting NetFlow – network protocol for collecting IP traffic information and monitoring network flow – data from ISPs in return for threat intelligence, and then selling it on.
The contract became public knowledge thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Motherboard which reveals that the federal agency’s Cyber Division spent “tens of thousands” of dollars to get its hands on this data.
The deal was worth $76,450 and was made in 2017.
NetFlow data provides information about traffic volume and flow on a network, such as servers communicating with each other. This is something that is known only to the server owner, or an ISP – and, thanks to deals companies like Team Cymru have with ISPs, also to the FBI and other buyers.
Team Cymru openly states that the product it sells can track traffic through VPNs, Motherboard writes. The company also offers data like visited URLs and cookies, however, the internal FBI document detailing the deal does not say if this was part of the package.
“Commercially provided net flow information/data – 2 months of service,” is what the document on what the FBI purchased states.
The FBI is not alone in showing interest in NetFlow data – the military does it as well, and according to a whistleblower who went to Senator Ron Wyden with their information, one of the customers is the Navy’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), a civilian federal law enforcement agency.
Several days ago, Wyden said that he asked the Department of Justice inspector general to look into how the FBI is buying and using metadata, also based on a whistleblower report, and now, concerning NetFlow data, the senator sees it as yet more proof that the FBI is buying metadata capable of showing “the websites Americans visit, as well as sensitive information such as what doctor a person sees, their religion or what dating sites they use.”
And for that, Wyden said in a statement, the FBI explained what data concerning Americans’ browsing history it buys and why.
“It is not acceptable for the government to go around the courts by using a credit card to buy private information, which is why I have proposed the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act to ban the purchase of this kind of private data,” he concluded.
According to Motherboard, neither the FBI nor Team Cymru were in the mood to offer any comment at this time.
FBI Whistleblowers Nail the Bureau at House Panel on Weaponization Hearings
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 05.03.2023
The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, dubbed by some lawmakers a new Church Committee, is pushing ahead with its investigation of alleged misconduct and political bias by US government agencies.
Just the News, a media outlet founded by award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, obtained some transcripts of the committee’s hearings which demonstrate that a growing number of FBI whistleblowers have stepped forward to expose the agency’s alleged misdeeds.
In particular, retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill testified that the Washington Field Office exerted pressure on other field offices to probe US citizens for activities protected by the First Amendment.
Hill revealed that the Washington office pressed his own Boston Field Office to open cases on 140 people who, according to the retired analyst, were “guilty” of riding buses to DC in order to attend then President Donald Trump’s rally on January 6, 2021.
The former FBI employee noted that on a nationwide phone call of all 56 FBI field offices, then-chief of the Domestic Terrorism Operations Center Section Steve Jensen asked the Philadelphia Field Office about the status of a lead on American individuals that had been sent by the agency’s DC office. The individuals in question posted on social media about being pro-Second Amendment and anti-abortion. According to Hill, Jensen described those persons as “bleeping terrorists” even though social media posts appeared to be their only fault.
FBI whistleblower Garret O’Boyle testified before the House GOP committee that he was suspended by the agency after making “protected disclosures” to Congress.
O’Boyle also told the House GOP committee that following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (which used to regard abortions a constitutional right in the US), the FBI prioritized possible threats against the justices from “pro-lifers,” i.e. those who are against abortions.
The whistleblower wondered at the time as to why the bureau was targeting pro-lifers when it was “pro-choice” people who threatened violence in front of justices’ houses. “I was like, why would this person know about those threats? He’s pro-life. Like, he’s not the one going and threatening the Supreme Court Justices,” O’Boyle testified.
Former FBI special agent Steve Friend, a former SWAT team member, testified before the committee that the bureau apparently misused heavily armed SWAT teams to arrest January 6 defenders who were not accused of violent crimes and did not have a criminal record. He particularly referred to a January Sixer who was cooperating with the FBI and willing to surrender voluntarily. Friend was concerned that the bureau wasn’t using the least intrusive methods possible to arrest them.
When Friend met with two senior officers he was “pushed back on” his concerns and was told that even though he had a right to raise them, he also should “follow through on the orders” which he was given.
Friend filed a whistleblower complaint to the US Office of Special Counsel last year concerning the apparent misuse of SWAT teams to arrest January Sixers accused of misdemeanors. He was suspended from his duties by the agency after that.
Speaking to Sputnik in January, Friend highlighted that “any objective observer can see that the FBI is concentrating its attention and resources to investigate and prosecute citizens holding opposing views to the current administration.”
Following his interview with Sputnik, Friend was forced to leave the FBI after he had been denied a paycheck for 150 straight days as his security clearance was placed under review in the wake of his whistleblower complaint. Speaking to US journalists in February, the former FBI agent said that after leaving the bureau he had accepted a job offer from a private nonprofit organization that will be conducting investigations of the FBI.
According to the US media, House Judiciary Democrats on Friday lashed out at the FBI whistleblowers in a 316-page report. The Democratic lawmakers claimed that the whistleblowers had “limited firsthand knowledge” and “did not present actual evidence of any wrongdoing at the Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” In response, the House GOP committee on weaponization lambasted their Democratic peers for disclosing the content of confidential witness depositions.
The House GOP’s new “Church Committee” follows in the footsteps of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which was a congressional body that investigated abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS in 1975.
The shocking revelations back in 1975 reportedly included Operation MKULTRA, human experimentation on mind control involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens; COINTELPRO, which envisaged the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil rights organizations; and Operation Mockingbird, a propaganda campaign run by the CIA in coordination with domestic and foreign journalists and US media outlets, to name but a few.
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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