Spain allows Israeli agent to interrogate Palestinian journalist in Madrid
MEMO | April 15, 2021
The Spanish security services have allowed an Israeli agent from the Mossad spy agency to interrogate a Palestinian journalist seeking asylum, Wafa news agency has reported. The incident at the Civil Guard building in the capital has been condemned by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate.
The syndicate called on the Spanish government to assume its responsibilities by ensuring the security of Muath Hamid and his family. It also called for the Spanish authorities to open an investigation into what happened during the interrogation.
Spain’s Civil Guard is the oldest law enforcement agency in the country and “military in nature”. The journalists’ union said that it is suspected of being “complicit” with Mossad in allowing the Israeli agent to interrogate Hamid in its building. “This was a gross violation of international law, a violation of Spanish sovereignty and a threat to the journalist’s security and safety,” the syndicate insisted.
It added that the case is being followed closely in conjunction with the Union of Spanish Journalists, the Palestinian Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Ministry, and the Spanish political and security authorities to ensure that Hamid is not subject to any harm or torture. The reporter for Al Araby TV and freelance contributor to Al-Araby Al-Jadeed is currently a refugee in Spain, where he lives with his wife and two children.
According to popular Spanish online newspaper Público last Friday, on 9 December Hamid received a telephone call from “Nicolás”, an officer on duty at the Civil Guard’s Spanish Information Services “Nicolás wanted to discuss Hamid’s work as a journalist, his past and his current life in Spain. This is a regular procedure for refugees and migrants.”
When the journalist went to meet “Nicolás” in Bilbao, he met another officer, Javier. “Hamid answered all the questions, explaining why he applied for asylum in Spain and describing his journey from Palestine to Europe through Turkey,” reported Público. “In early February, the young Palestinian journalist was summoned again by Nicolás… this time in the Spanish capital, Madrid.”
This time there was also another man in the room, allegedly named Omar, “who was introduced to him as a Palestinian. Hamid, however, immediately noticed his strong Israeli accent… and he decided to answer his questions in Hebrew.” Omar acknowledged that he was an Israeli, at which point Javier “left the room, leaving Muath in the hands of the supposed Mossad agent… who threatened the Palestinian journalist and his family, saying that they will never be allowed to go back to Palestine due to one of his journalistic investigations” related to the work of the Israeli spy agency.
Público sought comments and clarifications from the Israeli Embassy and the Civil Guard, as well as Spain’s Interior Ministry. It has received no replies.
Magic mushroom treatment on par with pharma drugs for combating depression, study finds
RT | April 15, 2021
In a small phase two trial, Imperial College researchers have found that psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, is at least as effective as pharmaceutical medication at treating depression.
In their admittedly small scale study, some 59 volunteers with depression were split into two groups.
One group was given a daily dosage of the widely used antidepressant escitalopram (AKA Lexapro, Cipralex, and others). They were also administered very weak doses of psilocybin twice, three weeks apart, over the course of the study.
The second group received much stronger doses of psilocybin, with a placebo instead of antidepressant medication.
After six weeks, the self-reported results from the patients suggested the psilocybin was just as effective as the pharmaceutical, and in many cases showed a slightly bigger – but ultimately statistically insignificant – improvement in symptoms.
The research team, led by Imperial College London neuroscientist Robin Carhart‑Harris, also highlighted the limited timeframe of the study as playing an important factor in the results, and suggested that a longer study might yield different results, possibly favouring pharmaceutical intervention.
The scientists were also quick to highlight the importance of guided psychotherapy to manage any hallucinatory experiences among the trial volunteers, lest members of the public attempt to self-medicate.
“We strongly believe that the … psychotherapy component is as important as the drug action,” Carhart-Harris said.
“With a psychedelic it is more about a release of thought and feeling that, when guided with psychotherapy, produces positive outcomes.”
Some five patients taking the SSRI stopped or reduced their doses due to negative effects, but none in the psilocybin group did. Furthermore, volunteers with a family history of psychosis were excluded from the trial, which may have tipped the results positively in favour of the psychedelic intervention.
Previous research has found that psilocybin treatment had fewer side effects and had an almost immediate impact compared with common antidepressant medication, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
SSRIs are often perceived to blunt emotional response, whereas the psilocybin had the opposite effect, according to fMRI scans which showed an apparent increase in emotional connections within the patients’ brains.
There are often a slew of side effects associated with SSRIs, ranging from lethargy and mood swings to so-called ‘brain zaps’, or the sensation of electrical shocks in the brain associated with the use (or discontinuation) of the medication.
SSRIs also typically have a lead time of up to six weeks to reach full effect, while ongoing side effects which can persist beyond this initial phase include insomnia, weight gain, and persistent fatigue, among others.
Further, the efficacy of such antidepressants can wane for some patients over time, so breakthroughs in the field of psychedelic treatments may provide huge relief for patients with adverse reactions to the more common interventions – though it is still too early to make any sweeping assertions about psilocybin treatments among the wider populace.
Still, with an estimated 800 million people with mental health disorders worldwide, new treatment options could soon be available.
The DOJ is Lying about the Ashley Babbitt case
The force was excessive so the DOJ punts on “willfulness”
Technofog | April 14, 2021
Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia issued a press release explaining their decision to not prosecute the officer who shot and killed unarmed protester (and veteran) Ashli Babbitt on January 6, 2021.
It states that DOJ officials, along with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, “conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting.” This included reviewing video footage, getting statements from officers and other witnesses, collecting physical evidence, and the results of Ms. Babbitt’s autopsy.
They explain:
“As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.”
You’ll notice there’s no mention of a verbal warning to Ms. Babbitt or other efforts to subdue her without the use of deadly force.
Continuing on, the DOJ maintains that the “focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws, concentrating on the possible application of 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute.”
The press release focused on the term “willfully”:
The DOJ concluded:
“The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
This conclusion should be no surprise. Not because of the law or the facts, but because of the people in charge of the Department of Justice. The U.S. Capitol Police, like the Park Police, have always had a special relationship with the DOJ – one that includes preferential treatment. This case is no different.
For starters, the three basic elements to a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 242 are that the defendant (1) acting under color of law; (2) willfully; (3) deprived the victim of a federally protected right.
Excessive force is easy to establish. The Supreme Court has held that the government must introduce evidence that the action of the officer in shooting to kill Babbitt was “excessive in relation” to a legitimate government objective. Kingsley v. Hendrickson, 135 S. Ct. 2466, 2473-2474 (2015). This is an objective standard – the force must be objectively unreasonable when viewed from the standpoint of a reasonable officer at the scene. Here, Babbitt was unarmed, was climbing through a window and not attacking anyone. In response, she is shot and killed. Easily excessive.
This brings us to “willfulness.”
We have serious doubts about the DOJ position that there was “no evidence” to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully violated Section 242. As an initial matter, the DOJ press release neglects to mention whether the officer used excessive force, instead going right to an analysis on willfulness. We believe this reveals their intent to soften the blow of the press release.
As to willfulness, 18 U.S.C. applies “when the defendant understands that he is unjustifiably invading a legally protected interest, or acts in reckless disregard of the law.” However, the defendant need not have been “thinking in constitutional terms,” as long as his “aim was not to enforce local law but to deprive a citizen of a right and that right was protected by the Constitution.” Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 106 (1945).
Here, the DOJ exaggerates – and at worst, lies – about its “willfulness burden.” We doubt the DOJ couldn’t prove willfulness in this case.
In fact, the DOJ has brought Section 242 prosecutions with less egregious facts.
As the DOJ has argued in other cases, the officer’s prior training on the use of force could be viewed “as evidence that his conduct was willful.” Are we to think that this officer didn’t have training on when force became excessive?
In another case, the DOJ argued to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that to establish “willfulness,” the jury was required to find that the defendant “intended to use more force than was reasonable under the circumstances – i.e., force that violated [the victim’s] well-established due rights as a pretrial detainee.”
What makes the Babbitt case different? The victim and the location.
This case should have gone to the jury. If this killing took place in Minnesota or Chicago the results would have been different.
Rolling Out Paedophile Enablers To Promote The COVID-19 Vaccine
Wake TF Up Weekly | April 14, 2021
If we live in a society that truly advocates for informed consent, it is paramount that we only take advice from reliable sources. It is also crucial to ensure that those who may be of a nefarious nature, attempting to sway our decisions in a particular direction, are kept at an arm’s length.
For example, you would never take medical advice from a trio of genocidal mass murderers.
Hence, on Monday, when I learned on watching UK Column that Edwina Currie was propagating for vaccine uptake, I took notice. In her video piece, she did the dirty work of her handlers, as instructed, playing her part in the stage show, doing what politicians do best – sowing division.
Referring to those who will decide against being vaccinated, or those who cannot be vaccinated, she exclaimed;
“Exercising their freedom not to have a vaccine? And they’re ‘perfectly healthy’? I don’t want them sitting next to me in theatre. I don’t want them standing next to me at the theatre bar. I don’t want them next to me or anywhere near me, or even on the same carriage on the train. So yea, they can exercise their freedom by staying at home. But millions and millions of us – 15 million pensioners – can’t wait to get out. You know what the main side effect of being vaccinated is, don’t you? And that’s itchy feet. We can go out there and I think there’s an obligation on our government to try and keep us as safe as possible. We are the majority.”
It should first be mentioned that ‘itchy feet’ is not the main side effect of being vaccinated, as Edwina points out. Far more common, as per the data of the UK’s government-approved Yellow Card system are cardiac disorders, of which there have been almost 6000 cases, and psychiatric disorders, of which there have been, give or take a few, 10,000 reports. This is on top of the 92 cases of blindness, the 55 spontaneous abortions, the 6700 blood disorders, 608 anaphylactic reactions and the 2000+ immune system disorders. And of course, there is another known side effect that can be considered a little more serious than mere itchy feet syndrome – namely, death – which has occurred 786 times. Surely worth a mention? Or why let facts spoil a good Big Pharma marketing promotion?
It should also be mentioned to Edwina that the idea the COVID-19 vaccine will keep her safe is erroneous. Recently released documents by the UK government predict that the next wave of COVID-19 infection will see the majority of hospitalisations and deaths ‘dominated’ by people who have already been vaccinated. Straight from the mouths of the corrupt horses that she served for decades. Perhaps, it should be the unvaccinated who are best avoiding people like Edwina if that’s the case. But why mention any of that when the COVID cult you shill for is watching?
In fact, sitting next to Edwina or standing next to her at a bar may not be desirable for a lot of people when we consider her background – and it has nothing to do with her immune system or vaccination status. Having her sat in a separate carriage on a train may indeed be worth contemplating – particularly if the train is bound for a prison. Surely, when one enables the mass rape and rampant sexual abuse of innocent children, there is no alternative destination for them, right?
British MP, Peter Morrison was Private Parliamentary Secretary to Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister of the UK and, like a long list of Westminster squad members, he was a notorious paedophile. Morrison would prey on children who were resident in care homes in the North Wales region. Between the years of 1974 and 1990, it is believed that over 600 children were abused in these institutions, of which the MP was a regular visitor. The depraved pervert was on two separate occasions found in the company of young boys in public lavatories by police officers where he would subject them to sexual abuse. In the typically British tradition of governments and law enforcement agencies allowing paedophiles to abuse, without the consequence of punishment, Morrison was not charged by British police, who we now know in 2021 are more suited to harassing and assaulting women, children and senior citizens than they are to putting away actual criminals such as paedophiles.
But police officers were not the only people to have turned a blind eye to the crimes of Peter Morrison. The Prime Minister did too. Margaret Thatcher had been warned by her own personal bodyguard, Barry Strevens, who was aware of claims that the MP was involved in orgies of abuse involving children. Instead of taking action to stop the paedophilia and having Morrison investigated and charged, the most powerful woman in the nation did nothing – besides subsequently promoting Morrison to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, that is.
As the years went on, victims would begin to come forward testifying to the crimes of Morrison, including a man who claimed to have been plied with alcohol before being raped by him at the age of 14 when he was an occupant of the now infamous Elm Guest House. Then in 2015, an investigation was initiated into a possible link between Morrison and the murder of an 8-year-old boy by the name of Vishal Mehrotra, who died mysteriously in 1981. It wasn’t until 2020 when an independent inquiry was carried out, that it was proven many top government officials were fully aware of these crimes and instead of intervening to prevent further rape and abuse, decided to look the other way.
One of those government officials was Edwina Currie.
In 2002, Edwina wrote and published her autobiography. In it she broached the topic of Morrison’s paedophilia and very clearly stated that she knew he was ‘a noted paederast’, and had heard him admit to this. Edwina would even go so far as to defend him when she opined that the crimes he engaged in would not be illegal today. As your average person will be aware, raping 14-year-old children after setting them drunk is as illegal and immoral today as it was back when Morrison was doing it. So is having sex with boys in public toilets. Not in the eyes of this demented woman though. To this day, she sees nothing wrong with her failure to act, as the lives of children were destroyed at the hands of a political reprobate. When quizzed about this she claimed that she had no proof that Morrison was a rapist, contradicting the claims in her book that she knew perfectly well and that he himself was not shy about talking of his twisted sexual preferences.
5 years, neither Edwina nor any of her colleagues did anything to stop the child abuse that they knew was occurring under their very noses. The ‘open secret’ led to continued sexual exploitation of vulnerable children in care homes. Refusing to act on the information that was present allowed the sick pervert, Morrison, to resume his rape and assault of boys. And now, today, this woman who actively and admittedly enabled a cycle of abuse to take place at the hands of a filthy vulture wants to lecture the public, looking down her big nose at those who value their freedom? A woman who allowed children to be defiled and degraded is virtue signalling to the public, brashly condemning those who don’t obey the dictates of the criminals in Westminster and their slithering, greasy pharmaceutical companions? Is this woman for real?
She should be hanging her head in shame every day of her existence, knowing that she allowed the deranged psychopaths of her institution to rape children. She should be summoned to court for her failure as a human being to prevent the unmentionable acts that were committed on the innocent and locked up for her complicity. Instead, she is publicly carrying out the wishes of a criminal cabal who will stop at nothing to see that humanity is fractured. Instead, she bows to the demands of a cesspit full of reptiles who are determined to create an underclass of citizens. She wilfully, with glee, mocks the people who are ‘exercising their freedom’ – the same people who paid her salary throughout the entirety of her useless political career and received zilch from her in return for their contributions.
Except of course for one thing which no one will ever forget. It was righteous-acting Edwina, who sees herself as such a responsible citizen that she would not dare risk sitting next to an unvaccinated person in a theatre lest she picks up and spreads a virus with a 99.97% survival rate, who introduced one of the most maniacal, evil and disgusting paedophiles/necrophiles in history into the lives of the children of Broadmoor hospital. I am of course talking about Jimmy Saville. It was indeed Vaccina Edwina who rubber-stamped and signed off on Saville’s access to the hospital, giving him unrestricted passage to the patients. As is now well known, Saville would go on to become a serial abuser of children and the tales of his monstrous, unnatural behaviour would leave scars on the minds of those who heard them first hand. It would devastate the lives of those who had to live them.
Saville was an individual Edwina once described as being ‘an amazing man’, stating he ‘has my full confidence’. This, despite the fact that, many civil servants in her circle had been privy to rumours that Saville had a reputation as a sleazebag, with a particular preference for younger girls. Regardless, Saville’s position in the hospital was approved, and with Edwina’s freshly stamped blessings he launched a campaign of perversion on children on an unimaginably horrific scale.
This is Edwina Currie – who views you as a second class citizen if you do not agree to be injected with a dangerous, experimental, unapproved, unnecessary jab that may leave you paralysed, blind or dead.
In my book, The COVID-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, I show how the COVID-19 pandemic is an illusion designed to bring about a New World Order that will enslave every man, woman and child alive and change the very essence of our society if it is allowed to happen. Those who designed this illusion are deeply disturbed, shameless creatures with zero empathy. They think that they can do or say whatever they like without any accountability. A perfect example of such a person is Edwina Currie. Coldheartedly and devoid of empathy, this psychopath has allowed children to be brutally raped. Callously she enabled paedophilia to be carried out inside what were believed to have been trusted establishment buildings. Edwina has no remorse and does not feel at all guilty about this. She is a soulless narcissist; unfeeling and uncompassionate. Yet, she believes that, if you chose not to be vaccinated, it is you who is unworthy and it is you who society should shun. Not her.
This is how detached from reality these people are. They are swimming in a sea of malevolence, helplessly corrupted to the core. They are the people who spit on the freedoms that were earned over centuries of battle by men and women with dignity and pride. They want to infect that freedom with their poisonous Communitarianism, which will benefit them in their Ivory Towers as the rest of humanity suffers. If you do indeed let them, they will succeed. Whether you are vaccinated or unvaccinated, people like Edwina Currie are a threat to your existence and a stain on your contentment and happiness. They are obsessively enabling the psychopathic leeches above them, as they destroy Western values. Just like Edwina sided with the predators who stalked Broadmoor and the North Wales children’s homes, she is now siding with the sinister forces that want to create hell on earth for you and your family. She will attempt to do this by turning you against your fellow human being. She will try to convince you that those who are not beholden to illegal government dictates are dangerous and dirty. She will try to brainwash you into believing this garbage, as she demonizes what she thinks is the minority and boasts of being part of the majority – exactly like the Nazis did in the 1930s.
Crazed and deranged people like Edwina Currie, who turn their backs on the vulnerable when they are being abused, are only relevant when people are divided.
Unite. Don’t allow her to be relevant.
Israeli Supreme Court green lights Israel’s ‘Cyber Unit’ that works with social media giants to censor user content
Adalah Press Release | April 12, 2021
Court authorizes Cyber Unit to continue operating in the shadows, conducting quasi-judicial censorship without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content.
The Israeli Supreme Court on Monday, 12 April 2021, rejected a petition filed by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) giving a green light to the continued operations of the Israeli state attorney’s office Cyber Unit and its “alternative enforcement” model of censoring social media content.
Israel’s Cyber Unit uses an “alternative enforcement” mechanism to essentially censor social media platforms and muzzle users: it flags and submits social media posts – without legal proceedings and often without even the knowledge of the individual user – to social media giants and requests their removal.
This Israeli state practice is aimed at clamping down on social media dissent, and frequently even results in the suspension or removal of users. This censorship is conducted in collaboration and coordination with social media outlets, including U.S.-based giants Facebook and Twitter.
Similar units operating in countries around the world are known as Internet Referral Units (IRUs).
Adalah attorneys Fady Khoury and Rabea Eghbariah had filed the petition against the Cyber Unit to the Israeli Supreme Court on 26 November 2019. They stressed that the Cyber Unit’s “alternative enforcement” mechanism violates the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process, and that the unit is operating without any legal authority.
Israeli Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer announced the decision on Monday morning in Jerusalem, in his final ruling before retirement.
In its decision, the court granted unchecked and unauthorized power to the Israeli state, allowing it to govern online speech by using informal channels with social media corporations. The court essentially privatized the judicial process, allowing private corporations to decide upon censorship of social media content based on ostensibly unbinding requests from Israeli state authorities.
Adalah Attorney Rabea Eghbariah commented immediately following the Israeli Supreme Court ruling:
“The Israeli Supreme Court has just authorized the state to continue to use its Cyber Unit to conduct quasi-judicial censorship proceedings in cooperation with private corporations, without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content. Israel’s Cyber Unit has operated in the shadows of the law to censor tens of thousands of social media posts every year. The Supreme Court has now, to our regret, given Israel a blank check to continue with this practice.”
The Military Origins of Facebook
Featured image: Mark Zuckerberg walks among attendees at a VR conference in Barcelona, Spain in 2016, Source: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page
BY WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| APRIL 12, 2021
In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as “anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacists, and anti-police,” was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.”
The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. “If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,” Baker had written on his Facebook event page.
Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first “precrime” arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing “increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,” the steady advance toward a precrime-centered “war on domestic terror” has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.
This new so-called war on domestic terror has actually resulted in many of these types of posts on Facebook. And, while Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a “town square” that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.
Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network’s origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing “humanized” artificial intelligence (AI).
As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.
DARPA’s Data Mining for “National Security” and to “Humanize” AI
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, DARPA, in close collaboration with the US intelligence community (specifically the CIA), began developing a “precrime” approach to combatting terrorism known as Total Information Awareness or TIA. The purpose of TIA was to develop an “all-seeing” military-surveillance apparatus. The official logic behind TIA was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra affair and for being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. A less well-known activity of Iran-Contra figures like Poindexter and Oliver North was their development of the Main Core database to be used in “continuity of government” protocols. Main Core was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the COG protocols were ever invoked. These protocols could be invoked for a variety of reasons, including widespread public opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of “national crisis” or “time of panic.” Americans were not informed if their name was placed on the list, and a person could be added to the list for merely having attended a protest in the past, for failing to pay taxes, or for other, “often trivial,” behaviors deemed “unfriendly” by its architects in the Reagan administration.
In light of this, it was no exaggeration when New York Times columnist William Safire remarked that, with TIA, “Poindexter is now realizing his twenty-year dream: getting the ‘data-mining’ power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.”
The TIA program met with considerable citizen outrage after it was revealed to the public in early 2003. TIA’s critics included the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.” As a result of the pressure, DARPA changed the program’s name to Terrorist Information Awareness to make it sound less like a national-security panopticon and more like a program aiming specifically at terrorists in the post-9/11 era.
DARPA’s IOA, oversaw Total Information Awareness during its brief existence
The TIA projects were not actually closed down, however, with most moved to the classified portfolios of the Pentagon and US intelligence community. Some became intelligence funded and guided private-sector endeavors, such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir, while others resurfaced years later under the guise of combatting the COVID-19 crisis.
Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter’s, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage’s project, LifeLog, sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.” Gage insisted, even after the program was shut down, that individuals would have had “complete control of their own data-collection efforts” as they could “decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data.” In the years since then, analogous promises of user control have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, only to be broken repeatedly for profit and to feed the government’s domestic-surveillance apparatus.
The information that LifeLog gleaned from an individual’s every interaction with technology would be combined with information obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the person saw and said, as well as biomedical monitors that gauged the person’s health. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as potentially supporting “medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.”
Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”
At the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA were not connected, despite their obvious parallels, and that LifeLog would not be used for “clandestine surveillance.” However, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,” which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance.
In addition to the ability to profile potential enemies of the state, LifeLog had another goal that was arguably more important to the national-security state and its academic partners—the “humanization” and advancement of artificial intelligence. In late 2002, just months prior to announcing the existence of LifeLog, DARPA released a strategy document detailing development of artificial intelligence by feeding it with massive floods of data from various sources.
The post-9/11 military-surveillance projects—LifeLog and TIA being only two of them—offered quantities of data that had previously been unthinkable to obtain and that could potentially hold the key to achieving the hypothesized “technological singularity.” The 2002 DARPA document even discusses DARPA’s effort to create a brain-machine interface that would feed human thoughts directly into machines to advance AI by keeping it constantly awash in freshly mined data.
One of the projects outlined by DARPA, the Cognitive Computing Initiative, sought to develop sophisticated artificial intelligence through the creation of an “enduring personalized cognitive assistant,” later termed the Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL. PAL, from the very beginning was tied to LifeLog, which was originally intended to result in granting an AI “assistant” human-like decision-making and comprehension abilities by spinning masses of unstructured data into narrative format.
The would-be main researchers for the LifeLog project also reflect the program’s end goal of creating humanized AI. For instance, Howard Shrobe at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his team at the time were set to be intimately involved in LifeLog. Shrobe had previously worked for DARPA on the “evolutionary design of complex software” before becoming associate director of the AI Lab at MIT and has devoted his lengthy career to building “cognitive-style AI.” In the years after LifeLog was cancelled, he again worked for DARPA as well as on intelligence community–related AI research projects. In addition, the AI Lab at MIT was intimately connected with the 1980s corporation and DARPA contractor called Thinking Machines, which was founded by and/or employed many of the lab’s luminaries—including Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, and Eric Lander—and sought to build AI supercomputers capable of human-like thought. All three of these individuals were later revealed to be close associates of and/or sponsored by the intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who also generously donated to MIT as an institution and was a leading funder of and advocate for transhumanist-related scientific research.
Soon after the LifeLog program was shuttered, critics worried that, like TIA, it would continue under a different name. For example, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told VICE at the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, “It would not surprise me to learn that the government continued to fund research that pushed this area forward without calling it LifeLog.”
Along with its critics, one of the would-be researchers working on LifeLog, MIT’s David Karger, was also certain that the DARPA project would continue in a repackaged form. He told Wired that “I am sure such research will continue to be funded under some other title . . . I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of a such a key research area.”
The answer to these speculations appears to lie with the company that launched the exact same day that LifeLog was shuttered by the Pentagon: Facebook.
Thiel Information Awareness
After considerable controversy and criticism, in late 2003, TIA was shut down and defunded by Congress, just months after it was launched. It was only later revealed that that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided up among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state. Some of it was privatized.
The same month that TIA was pressured to change its name after growing backlash, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir, which was, incidentally, developing the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield. Soon after Palantir’s incorporation in 2003, Richard Perle, a notorious neoconservative from the Reagan and Bush administrations and an architect of the Iraq War, called TIA’s Poindexter and said he wanted to introduce him to Thiel and his associate Alex Karp, now Palantir’s CEO. According to a report in New York magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”
Peter Thiel speaks at the World Economic Forum in 2013, Source: Mirko Ries Courtesy for the World Economic Forum
Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006.
The money was certainly useful. In addition, Alex Karp told the New York Times in October 2020, “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including the investment in Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer, Alan Wade, who had been the intelligence community’s point man for Total Information Awareness. Wade had previously cofounded the post-9/11 Homeland Security software contractor Chiliad alongside Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell and daughter of Iran-Contra figure, intelligence operative, and media baron Robert Maxwell.
After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA would be Palantir’s only client until 2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, every two weeks. Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s chief information officer during this time remained one of TIA’s architects. Alan Wade played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products.
Today, Palantir’s products are used for mass surveillance, predictive policing, and other disconcerting policies of the US national-security state. A telling example is Palantir’s sizable involvement in the new Health and Human Services–run wastewater surveillance program that is quietly spreading across the United States. As noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout report, that system is the resurrection of a TIA program called Biosurveillance. It is feeding all its data into the Palantir-managed and secretive HHS Protect data platform. The decision to turn controversial DARPA-led programs into a private ventures, however, was not limited to Thiel’s Palantir.
The Rise of Facebook
The shuttering of TIA at DARPA had an impact on several related programs, which were also dismantled in the wake of public outrage over DARPA’s post-9/11 programs. One of these programs was LifeLog. As news of the program spread through the media, many of the same vocal critics who had attacked TIA went after LifeLog with similar zeal, with Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists telling Wired at the time that “LifeLog has the potential to become something like ‘TIA cubed.’” LifeLog being viewed as something that would prove even worse than the recently cancelled TIA had a clear effect on DARPA, which had just seen both TIA and another related program cancelled after considerable backlash from the public and the press.
The firestorm of criticism of LifeLog took its program manager, Doug Gage, by surprise, and Gage has continued to assert that the program’s critics “completely mischaracterized” the goals and ambitions of the project. Despite Gage’s protests and those of LifeLog’s would-be researchers and other supporters, the project was publicly nixed on February 4, 2004. DARPA never provided an explanation for its quiet move to shutter LifeLog, with a spokesperson stating only that it was related to “a change in priorities” for the agency. On DARPA director Tony Tether’s decision to kill LifeLog, Gage later told VICE, “I think he had been burnt so badly with TIA that he didn’t want to deal with any further controversy with LifeLog. The death of LifeLog was collateral damage tied to the death of TIA.”
Fortuitously for those supporting the goals and ambitions of LifeLog, a company that turned out to be its private-sector analogue was born on the same day that LifeLog’s cancellation was announced. On February 4, 2004, what is now the world’s largest social network, Facebook, launched its website and quickly rose to the top of the social media roost, leaving other social media companies of the era in the dust.
Sean Parker of Founders Fund speaks during the LeWeb conference in 2011, Source: @Kmeron for LeWeb11 @ Les Docks de Paris
A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for cofounding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect controversial DARPA programs that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which recruited him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006.
Thiel and Facebook cofounder Mosokvitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook cofounders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for a handful of US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. In the case of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Palantir was also involved in utilizing Facebook data to benefit the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign.
Today, as recent arrests such as that of Daniel Baker have indicated, Facebook data is slated to help power the coming “war on domestic terror,” given that information shared on the platform is being used in “precrime” capture of US citizens, domestically. In light of this, it is worth dwelling on the point that Thiel’s exertions to resurrect the main aspects of TIA as his own private company coincided with his becoming the first outside investor in what was essentially the analogue of another DARPA program deeply intertwined with TIA.
Facebook, a Front
Because of the coincidence that Facebook launched the same day that LifeLog was shut down, there has been recent speculation that Zuckerberg began and launched the project with Moskovitz, Saverin, and others through some sort of behind-the-scenes coordination with DARPA or another organ of the national-security state. While there is no direct evidence for this precise claim, the early involvement of Parker and Thiel in the project, particularly given the timing of Thiel’s other activities, reveals that the national-security state was involved in Facebook’s rise. It is debatable whether Facebook was intended from its inception to be a LifeLog analogue or if it happened to be the social media project that fit the bill after its launch. The latter seems more likely, especially considering that Thiel also invested in another early social media platform, Friendster.
An important point linking Facebook and LifeLog is the subsequent identification of Facebook with LifeLog by the latter’s DARPA architect himself. In 2015, Gage told VICE that “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point.” He tellingly added, “We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”
Users of Facebook and other large social media platforms have so far been content to allow these platforms to sell their private data so long as they publicly operate as private enterprises. Backlash only really emerged when such activities were publicly tied to the US government, and especially the US military, even though Facebook and other tech giants routinely share their users’ data with the national-security state. In practice, there is little difference between the public and private entities.
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, notably warned in 2019 that Facebook is just as untrustworthy as US intelligence, stating that “Facebook’s internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment. And damn the consequences.”
Snowden also stated in the same interview that “the more Google knows about you, the more Facebook knows about you, the more they are able . . . to create permanent records of private lives, the more influence and power they have over us.” This underscores how both Facebook and intelligence-linked Google have accomplished much of what LifeLog had aimed to do, but on a much larger scale than what DARPA had originally envisioned.
The reality is that most of the large Silicon Valley companies of today have been closely linked to the US national-security state establishment since their inception. Notable examples aside from Facebook and Palantir include Google and Oracle. Today these companies are more openly collaborating with the military-intelligence agencies that guided their development and/or provided early funding, as they are used to provide the data needed to fuel the newly announced war on domestic terror and its accompanying algorithms.
It is hardly a coincidence that someone like Peter Thiel, who built Palantir with the CIA and helped ensure Facebook’s rise, is also heavily involved in Big Data AI-driven “predictive policing” approaches to surveillance and law enforcement, both through Palantir and through his other investments. TIA, LifeLog, and related government and private programs and institutions launched after 9/11, were always intended to be used against the American public in a war against dissent. This was noted by their critics in 2003-4 and by those who have examined the origins of the “homeland security” pivot in the US and its connection to past CIA “counterterror” programs in Vietnam and Latin America.
Ultimately, the illusion of Facebook and related companies as being independent of the US national-security state has prevented a recognition of the reality of social media platforms and their long-intended, yet covert uses, which we are beginning to see move into the open following the events of January 6. Now, with billions of people conditioned to use Facebook and social media as part of their daily lives, the question becomes: If that illusion were to be irrevocably shattered today, would it make a difference to Facebook’s users? Or has the populace become so conditioned to surrendering their private data in exchange for dopamine-fueled social-validation loops that it no longer matters who ends up holding that data?
Part 2 of this series on Facebook will explore how the social media platform has grown into a behemoth that is much more extensive than what LifeLog’s program managers had originally envisioned. In concert with military contractors and former heads of DARPA, Facebook has spent the last several years doing two key things: (1) preparing to play a much larger role in surveillance and data mining than it currently does; and (2) advancing the development of a “humanized” AI, a major objective of LifeLog.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
