By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 10, 2023
With Russia’s arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, U.S. officials are accusing Russia of using Americans as “political hostages.” That may well be true, but the fact is that while the U.S. government acts like an innocent, the fact is that it plays the political-hostage game as well as Russia. In fact, the U.S. government might well be the one that started this vicious political game with Russia.
On March 6, 2008, a Russian arms dealer named Viktor Bout was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand, on criminal charges brought by the U.S. government. The U.S. government sought Bout’s extradition to the United States, which he fervently opposed. The extradition proceedings took two years, during which time Bout was incarcerated in a Thai jail.
A Thai district court denied the U.S. extradition request, but the ruling was overturned by a Thai appellate court. On November 10, 2010, Bout was extradited to the United States to stand trial.
The Russian government vehemently objected to Bout’s prosecution, much as the U.S. government is vehemently objecting to Evan Gershkovich’s prosecution. But U.S. officials steadfastly ignored Russia’s objections to Bout’s prosecution as much as Russia is ignoring U.S. objections to Gershkovich’s prosecution.
Bout was an international arms dealer. He sold weaponry to all sorts of groups around the world. U.S. officials condemned him for his profession, while ignoring one great big important fact: The U.S. government is the biggest arms dealer in the world, also selling arms to all sorts of groups around the world, including tyrannical regimes that use such arms to suppress their own citizenry.
It’s worth noting that Bout wasn’t the only international arms dealer. There were lots of them around the world.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials decide to target him with criminal prosecution. Why would they select him out of all the other international arms dealers? My hunch is that there were two reasons: (1) As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the U.S. didn’t like the competition that Bout provided; and (2) More important, Bout was a Russian citizen, and it was during this period of time — 2008 — that the Pentagon was proceeding apace with its long-term plan of reinvigorating its old Cold War racket against Russia. By targeting a Russian citizen — especially one with close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin — with arrest, prosecution, and incarceration, the Pentagon knew that that could go a long way toward reestablishing hostile relations and a renewed Cold War with Russia.
But there was one big problem: Bout hadn’t violated any U.S. laws.
So, what does a regime do when it wants to target a person who hasn’t committed a crime? Answer: It simply makes up a crime. And that is precisely what the U.S. government did to get Russian citizen Viktor Bout. U.S. officials used a concocted, made-up crime to get him.
Here’s how their scheme worked. U.S. officials assigned the dirty deed to the DEA. Yes, you read that right — the DEA. Now, keep in mind that the DEA stands for the Drug Enforcement Administration. The operative word in the title is “Drug.” The DEA is charged with enforcing one of the U.S. government’s biggest and oldest failed and destructive government programs — the war on drugs.
Thus, notwithstanding that the DEA’s balliwick is drug enforcement and not arms enforcement, the DEA was charged with the task of coming up with a concocted, made-up crime relating to the sale of weapons in order to get Viktor Bout.
The DEA enlisted the assistance of two Colombians to serve as secret agents of the DEA. Acting as agents of FARC, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group in Colombia that U.S. officials have designated as a terrorist organization, the secret DEA agents contacted a man named Andrew Smulian, who was a friend of Bout. The secret DEA agents falsely told Smulian that FARC wanted to purchase arms from Bout.
Smulian contacted Bout and told him about the proposed deal. Bout agreed to meet with the secret DEA agents in Bangkok. During that meeting, which was being secretly recorded, Bout and the secret DEA agents struck a deal in which Bout agreed to sell them a large quantity of armaments. At that point, the Thai police, which were working with the DEA, swooped in and arrested Bout.
U.S. officials charged Bout with “conspiracy” to sell armaments to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. During the negotiations, the secret DEA agents had said that they planned to use the weapons to kill U.S. drug-enforcement officials operating in Colombia. Bout remarked something to the effect that he didn’t care, given that the U.S. was an enemy to him as well. Based on that remark, which was made in the context of sales negotiations in response to what the secret DEA agents had said to Bout, U.S. officials ended up charging Bout with a “conspiracy” to kill U.S. officials.
There are few things that stick out in this scenario.
One, Bout never entered the United States. His actions in attempting to sell arms to what he was led to believe was FARC took place entirely in Thailand, which is about 8,500 miles from the United States.
Two, there is no legal reason why any Russian citizen is bound by some designation by the U.S. government that some foreign entity is a terrorist organization. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Russian citizens, like other foreign citizens, are not bound by laws or edicts issued by the U.S. government, any more than U.S. citizens are bound by laws or edicts issued by the Russian government or some other foreign government.
Three, Bout never sold any arms to FARC because FARC wasn’t part of this deal. It was the DEA that was secretly acting like it was FARC.
The question naturally arises: Why does the U.S. government have criminal jurisdiction over a Russian citizen’s decision to sell weapons to a group in Colombia, especially given that the Russia citizen never sets foot in the United States?
Knowing that they would have problems proving that Bout sold weapons to FARC, which he clearly didn’t, U.S. officials decided to rely on a “conspiracy” charge against him. A “conspiracy” is an agreement to perform a criminal act. It has long been an easy way for U.S. officials to win convictions when all else fails.
But a “conspiracy” requires an agreement between two or more people. It is difficult to understand who Bout supposedly agreed with to sell the armaments. He couldn’t be charged with conspiring with those secret DEA agents to sell arms because conspiracy law requires that he enter into an agreement with someone else — i.e., not the government — to perform a criminal act. That is, under the law of conspiracy, Bout cannot be charged with conspiring with those secret DEA agents to sell the arms.
Moreover, he didn’t conspire with his friend Smulian because Smulian wasn’t selling the armaments. He was simply acting as a go-between who got the two parties together, much like a real-estate broker does in a sale of a home. When Bout met with those secret DEA agents in Bangkok, he agreed on his own to sell them the weapons. Thus, who did he conspire with?
Of course, none of this mattered when Bout was brought to trial. He was a Russian and an international arms dealer. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in jail. Not surprisingly, his sentence was upheld on appeal.
It was all based on a made-up crime, one concocted by the DEA. But it served its purpose in helping to fulfill the Pentagon’s long-term aim of bringing about hostile relations between the United States and Russia and reinvigorating the Pentagon’s old Cold War racket against Russia.
After being forced to serve some 12 years of his life in a federal penitentiary (and two additional years in a Thai jail) for committing a made-up, concocted, fake crime, on December 8, 2022, Bout was traded for U.S. citizen Brittney Griner, who, ironically, was caught in Russia violating the war on drugs, which the Russian government enforces as fiercely as the DEA does here in the United States. As far as I know, the DEA has never issued an official opinion on the Griner-Bout trade.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 8, 2023
Twitter globally withheld a tweet by an Indian Home Minister in response to a “legal demand.” The news was shared by Journalist and Right to Information (RTI) activist Saurav Das, who posted screenshots of two tweets, one of which was a quoted Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah with a notice from the social media platform that said the content had been withheld in “worldwide.”
This is a first as Twitter normally restricts content in the territory that the legal demand has come from unless the tweet has violated the platform’s Terms of Service.
Das said that he could not remember the context of the withheld tweet. It is also not clear which government agency requested the content to be taken down.
The tweet was not accessible even via a virtual private network connected to the US.
“Twitter representatives expressed concern about the growing number of actors demanding that platforms remove content under broad and unclear definitions and the need for greater transparency from governments about such requests,” the Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (SRFOE) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) said in a press release following a delegation’s visit to the company’s headquarters.
“They also argued that demands to curb illegal content must adhere to human rights regulatory frameworks and respect the fundamental purposes of freedom of expression,” the delegation added. Twitter’s Global Government Affairs team (formerly its Policy team) said in a tweet mentioning the delegation’s visit that “government requests [should] respect the fundamental purposes of freedom of expression.”
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | April 6, 2023
Bombshell vaccine safety surveillance data out of Western Australia shows it was reactions from the Covid vaccine that were overwhelming local hospitals. Data shows Australia’s zero-Covid plan was for nothing, as cases have spiked.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | April 6, 2023
In March 2022, Florida Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, faced significant criticism for advising against the COVID-19 vaccine for children under 17, citing reported risks outweighing the benefits. Now, W.H.O. has rolled back its own recommendation on the vaccine for healthy children and teenagers. Dr. Ladapo joins Del for a nice ‘I told you so’.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | April 6, 2023
No matter what political affiliation, American’s are now entertaining the idea that someone in their family may have died from a Covid jab. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others now approach the 2024 elections, vaccine safety and mandated medicine have become a top issue.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 4, 2023
YouTube has suspended the channel of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) for allegedly violating its election misinformation policies. The 7-day ban came a day before Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan, and the network’s coverage of the arraignment.
RSBN is an independent media organization founded in 2015, primarily focused on providing conservative news coverage and commentary in the United States.
The network gained prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign by live-streaming Donald Trump’s rallies and events. Since then, the network has continued to cover conservative political events, speeches, and interviews, while also providing analysis and opinion on relevant topics.
RSBN is recognized for its pro-Trump stance and sharing of conservative viewpoints in the media landscape.
On Monday, the network received a notice that several of its videos, including an exclusive interview with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, his recent rally in Waco, Texas, and his comments at the most recent CPAC event, had been removed for violating its election misinformation policies.
Aside from violating policies against making claims of fraud in the 2020 elections and 2022 election in Brazil, the videos were also removed for lack of “countervailing views.”
Because of the violations, YouTube imposed one strike and temporarily suspended the channel for a week, the same week when President Trump became the first US President in history to face criminal charges.
“Accordingly, the videos have been removed and a strike has been applied to the channel, and as a result, uploads and live streams by your account are suspended for a week. You can read more about our strikes system here,” a YouTube representative told RSBN.
“Conveniently, YouTube’s Orwellian censorship practices have returned just one day before President Trump is arraigned in a gross weaponization of the justice system,” RBN said in a statement.
“Rather than allowing RSBN to show a countervailing view to the mainstream media’s version of the arraignment, they are simply shutting down our efforts. Again, they are leaving millions of Americans voiceless in the face of tyranny.”
This isn’t the first time RSBN has been suspended from YouTube just hours before a planned event.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 7, 2023
Twitter is facing fines in Germany for not censoring content deemed illegal under the country’s strict “hate speech” laws.
The federal government announced that it was investigating Twitter’s failures to act on censorship requests.
According to Chan-jo Jun, founder of specialist IT law firm JunIT Rechtsanwälte, the federal government is only acting on a few, out of the hundreds, of cases that have been reported.
Jun will be representing the Antisemitism Commissioner of the state Baden-Württemberg, Michael Blume.
Towards the end of last year, Jun’s firm filed a lawsuit against Twitter for refusing to remove hate speech content.
The court said that the tweets were “illegal.” On Tuesday the federal government said that there were “sufficient indications of failures” by Twitter.
Jun initially reported several tweets to the Federal Justice Office (BfJ). However, they were told that there was not enough material to prove systemic failure.
“We had reported a number of cases to the [BfJ] at that time, and found that they agreed that these tweets were illegal but said they do not have enough material for a systematic failure. And that’s when a group of volunteers started to systematically search for illegal content and keep reporting that and making a huge database… and they kept submitting that to the [BfJ]. So it’s over 600 cases,” he said.
“The ones that are now subject to the [federal government’s] case appear to be just the first ones. They picked them out because they were all similar in that way — I think they came from the same user and had the same content. That’s probably why they chose those because it would be the easiest case to see that is systematical failure. That it was not a single failure of one content moderator but actually that the vast majority — or all — of reports were wrongly handled.”
NetzDG carries a fine of up to €50 million per case, but Jun said it was unlikely that Twitter would be fined the maximum.
“The law expects fines of up to €50 million for each case. It is possible that at first they will not take the full amount. There’s actually a table… that states the intensity of the failure. So I would expect something between €5M and €20M to be the first fine,” he suggested, in an interview with TechCrunch.
By Timur Fomenko | RT | April 4, 2023
As the United States contemplates a possible ban on TikTok, it relentlessly accuses Beijing of using the popular Chinese-owned social media application as a means of espionage, claiming that the Communist Party has access to user data.
Ironically, Washington itself is known to be doing exactly what US politicians are accusing China of doing. Using the unique advantage of having jurisdiction over the world’s top internet companies, the US has given itself the right to look into the private communications of foreign citizens anywhere in the world. Combine that data-sharing between intelligence agencies of the US and its allies, and you get the most comprehensive espionage regime in the world.
While American politicians and media constantly talk about fears of Chinese espionage, the near-absence of coverage of Washington’s own spying efforts ought to be a reminder of where the true power lies. When it comes to the shady activities of the CIA and the NSA, the public tends to only learn what they did years later from declassified documents, or what they “have been doing all along” from rare whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. All discussion and speculation about what they “may be doing right now” tends to be dismissed as conspiracy theories. Conversely, allegations of Chinese spying activities are constantly explained as “we all know they’re doing it” in the public eye, despite the lack of solid proof.
These warning signs remind us that the most cryptic source of all spying in the world is not China, but the US. Since the Second World War, the US has, in conjunction with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, maintained a worldwide spying regime known as the ‘Five Eyes’ which, in the age of mass communications, has been designed so that each government can bypass its own privacy laws and judicial restraints in order to spy on each other’s citizens, while supplying information within the group. In doing so, they have created a number of communication interception and surveillance programs, as revealed by Snowden, such as PRISM, ECHELON, XKEYSCORE, etc.
Of course, the US nearly holds a monopoly over the means of information and data gathering – definitely more so than any other country. This is because it has the privilege of having the world’s most dominant internet companies located on its own soil, such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Meta. These organizations are required by law to share data with the US government and authorities should they request it. But the US has also gone even further, as revealed by the Washington Post in 2020, the CIA had secretly acquired a Swiss cryptography company and used it to rig those machines to be able to spy on all who used them.
In pursuing its comprehensive spying regime, the US has been keeping an eye on friend and foe alike. This has included wiretapping the chancellor of Germany, coordinating with the intelligence services of other countries to undermine their commercial interests, such as Denmark and the Eurofighter program, and the list goes on.
And yet, American lawmakers suggest that you should truly be scared of TikTok, even as they prepare to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows US intelligence agencies to spy on foreign citizens’ phones and online communications without a warrant. Legalized in 2008, Section 702 needs to be reauthorized every few years lest it lapses under a sunset clause. Congress extended it in 2012 and again in 2018 and there’s little reason to believe it will fail to do so again before the next deadline, set for December this year.
The real problem Washington has with TikTok is not the alleged spying for Beijing’s benefit – it’s the fact that TikTok is the first global-spanning social media network of its magnitude that isn’t under US control – and thus, cannot be weaponized by the US for its own espionage. As such, it weakens the global surveillance regime built up by the US, which is, perhaps, the principal motivation behind Washington’s obsession with keeping control of “the future of the internet” out of Beijing’s hands. It’s more than a matter of spy games – it’s a matter of hegemony, and as such, it’s pure projection on Washington’s part to sound the alarm over TikTok’s alleged breaches of privacy.
As it stands, the US has an unrivaled digital spying network and is the greatest single threat to individual privacy online. If major internet companies are not owned or controlled by Washington or its closest allies, then the privacy of individuals around the world is increased, not decreased. The US has never been apologetic or open about how it monitors the communications of billions of people. Even if one has their suspicions about China, how can Washington’s claims about TikTok, and the motives behind the mounting pressure on the social media platform, be taken at face value?
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | APRIL 7, 2023
Writer Jacob Siegel has talked to UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers about America’s new censorship complex. In a 13,000 word essay for Tablet, Siegel explains how ‘disinformation’ is an invention that has morphed into a tool of governance. He told Sayers:
Disinformation is a means by which the Government in cooperation with private tech companies and civil society, NGO groups, censors, uses extra-legal means to censor political discourse around issues like Covid vaccinations, lockdowns, the elections. And in the U.S., it’s a free-for-all. It’s a blank cheque to censor anything. So on one level, disinformation is ostensibly censorship in order to protect national security. In a larger sense, that machinery of censorship is not opportunistically looking to erase certain things from the public record that are unflattering to political elites. It’s actually rather more than that. It is a means of governance. It is a system of power. It is its own system of power, outside of the formal, official — in the U.S., constitutional — means by which the Government is supposed to operate.
How did this ‘tool of governance’ become so mainstream, asks Sayers? The U.S. Government, Siegel points out, has long engaged in promoting disinformation of its own, but the ‘war on disinformation’ was begun by Barack Obama. One of the last things the former President did while in office was sign into law the ‘Countering Foreign Disinformation Act’, which fully committed the U.S. to a counter-disinformation campaign, which according to Siegel “was really always in spirit, and very quickly in practice as well, an information war directed against the American people”.
Siegel continues:
There was originally this foreign dimension… But from the very beginning, ‘foreign’ is a kind of ruse that’s setting up what is actually a much larger, effectively omni-directional structure, because the internet is global, that can censor anywhere but which is, in practice, focused on the domestic political environment inside the U.S. and specifically on this populist surge, which is taken as an existential threat by the ruling party officials in the U.S. who see populism in truly apocalyptic terms.
Siegel argues that the consequences of this censorship for American society should not to be minimised:
The system of secrecy and the Government’s own promotion of conspiracies, like the idea that Donald Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin or a Russian stooge, which the U.S. intelligence agencies promoted. It’s not simply that they are wrong or pernicious, or that this reflects corruption. They actually drive people crazy. They deranged the political system. They ruin the ability for people to engage sanely and transparently in their own politics.
Worth reading (and watching) in full.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2023
Judicial Watch has decided to sue the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the federal agency failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records related to meetings with Big Tech representatives where censorship was allegedly discussed.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to force the DHS to disclose documents detailing how its Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) worked with companies behind social media platforms in order to censor speech.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
The initial FOIA request dates back to December of last year, and the advocacy group said that it wanted to gain access to records and communications of CISA Director Jen Easterly, a former CISA director, Christopher Krebs, former CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Matt Masterson, and CISA Senior Cybersecurity Advisor Brian Scully.
These documents concern meetings that CISA either hosted or facilitated with Meta and Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia Foundation, Pinterest, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn on the topic of “election security.”
Furthermore, Judicial Watch wanted information about several other meetings, including those with DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, FBI, US Secret Service, NSA, and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence employees, related to the previously mentioned meetings, and those with Election Infrastructure Subsector Government Coordinating Council.
The Judicial Watch press release refers to the Twitter Files where journalist Matt Taibbi on several occasions mentions CISA’s involvement in censorship activities, and cites these and the dates when the contacts or communication occurred.
The group also refers to Twitter Files revelations regarding the FBI’s role in censorship decisions, notably the pressure it exerted on the site to act in this way, and Taibbi’s testimony before Congress about the collusion between the Biden administration – including the Democratic National Committee and federal, state, and local law enforcement – and Big Tech, with the goal of suppressing legitimate information.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton described all this, and more that is mentioned in the statement, as “an unholy conspiracy in the Biden administration to censor Americans in collusion with Big Tech.”
As for the lawsuit, Fitton said it “shows the censorship abuse is furthered by unlawful secrecy and cover-ups.”
By Andrew Korybko | April 7, 2023
Senior Ukrainian presidential advisor Mikhail Podolyak brazenly admitted to Kiev’s genocidal intentions in the NATO-Russian proxy war that’s presently being fought in his former Soviet Republic during an interview with US Government-controlled “Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty” (RFERL). The relevant excerpt will now be shared in order to raise awareness of his words, which can be read in their original Ukrainian at that outlet’s website here for those skeptics who doubt that he truly said them:
“We have to completely close everything related to the Russian cultural space [in Crimea after its reconquest]. We have to eradicate everything Russian. There should be only Ukrainian cultural space or global cultural space. We should not have a dialogue about whether a person has the right to use the Russian language or not. At home, please use it, but it is not a tool of pressure, it is not a tool of protest, it is not a tool of blackmail.”
Podolyak admitted to precisely what Moscow has always accused Kiev of intending since the Western-backed fascist coup of early 2014 popularly known as “EuroMaidan”, namely the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Crimea’s indigenous Russian population. He therefore inadvertently justified its democratic reunification with Russia that was carried out for the purpose of defending its people’s UN-enshrined human rights, thus discrediting his side’s and its foreign patrons’ moral stance in this conflict.
Not only that, but the so-called “rules-based order” that’s aggressively being promoted by the US-led West’s Golden Billion was exposed as a hypocritical sham. That de facto New Cold War bloc isn’t waging their proxy war against Russia in order to defend “democracy” and “human rights” like its propagandists claim, but to advance Kiev’s publicly confirmed goals that stand in direct contradiction to those two concepts.
Any political force in the West that agitates for literally eradicating another culture and prohibiting its people from speaking their native language outside of their homes would rightly be condemned by society as fascist, yet there’s no chance that the US or EU will ever normalize describing Kiev in that way. These double standards speak to the ulterior motives connected to the previously mentioned “rules-based order”, which has always been about advancing American hegemony on any given pretext.
Returning to Podolyak’s candid admission, nobody can credibly claim that funding Kiev isn’t equivalent to funding fascism. There’s no other way to describe that side’s intention to eradicate Russian culture in its entirety and prohibit its people from speaking their native language in public. This bonafide fascism is being funded by the West in violation of its own self-proclaimed “values”, which reveals that everything it’s claimed about wanting to defend “democracy” and “human rights” across the world was simply a lie.
Sputnik – 06.04.2023
The persecution of former US President Donald Trump takes a page out of the Zelensky regime’s playbook, Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk wrote in a commentary for The Other Ukraine Telegram channel.
Judge for yourself: the US government declares that it is ready to finance the war in Eastern Europe forever and indefinitely.
Of course, the American people have questions about why the country needs this war, why it has no end, and where the voters’ taxes are actually going. The American voter is not interested in funding a war on the other side of the globe because they see serious problems at home. Against this backdrop, the politics of peace becomes attractive to the American voter and is destined for a quick victory.
And now watch the hands. The country’s justice system is politically violated, and a peacekeeper is declared a criminal without any serious evidence, based solely on political desires. All this has already happened in Ukraine. First of all, we accuse politicians who stand for peace of crimes that do not exist. But it is impossible to stop here, as the Ukrainian experience shows. Next, the “wrong” media and parties with a pro-peace agenda must be shut down, churches that preach peace must be persecuted, the “wrong” political movements must be banned, and active citizens who advocate peace must be thrown in jail. And call all this a victory for democracy. This is what the American disciples did in Ukraine. But as far as the US is concerned, all this can only lead to a large-scale war, which Trump warns of in every speech.
All this means one thing: the much-praised Ukrainian “democracy” imposed by the United States in Ukraine has crawled into America and will destroy the state institutions of this country, just as Ukrainian statehood was destroyed before.
This is what Trump warns of: “We are in many ways a third world country. We are a country whose economy is floundering, whose supply chains are broken, whose stores are not full, whose deliveries are not coming in, and whose education system is at the bottom of every list…” And recently, he said, “Our country is going to hell.”
And here it is impossible not to agree with him, because Ukraine is already in hell, and it is dragging the US with it. Ukrainian students have surpassed their American teachers and have become teachers of legal chaos themselves. It only remains to add that Ukraine was pushed into a hell of lawlessness and arbitrariness by American policies, and today it is reaping the fruits of its own actions. As the saying goes, “God will repay each one according to his deeds.”
RT | April 5, 2023
Estonia has blocked access to 53 websites that were used to watch banned Russian TV channels, the Baltic country’s Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority (TTJA) said on Wednesday.
The regulator added that the crackdown was conducted in accordance with the EU sanctions on Russian media.
TTJA Director General Kristi Talving cited a poll commissioned by the Estonian government, which found that the trust of Russian channels has fallen from 40% to 18%. “Based on these numbers, we can say that the work to protect the Estonian information space has been effective,” Talving said.
Nearly 40% of people living in Estonia speak Russian, according to the official census. The country has had a sizable Russian minority from the time that it was part of the Soviet Union.
The EU banned the broadcasting of content from multiple Russian news organizations, including RT, in response to Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, which was launched in February 2022. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, accused the news outlets of spreading disinformation.
Estonia separately banned six Russian TV channels in February 2022. The next month, the TTJA blacklisted seven outlets, including Channel One and news agency TASS.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has described the ban on the country’s news organizations in the EU as an act of censorship aimed at “purging the information space of the presence of any media that is an alternative to Western [media].”
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Bob Finch | January 26, 2009
Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 