Surveillance Society - The Emerging Police State in New Zealand (et al)
For many years now laws have been passed, in New Zealand as in all other Western countries that little by little, erode away our provacy and rights. These laws usually come in under the guise of protecting us or our security from 'terror threat' and the like.
While many dismiss concerns about these laws coming into effect as paranoia, the fact is that the legislation that is being passed has some pretty nasty capabilities if activated and not dormant.
Governments have demonstrated a propensity for always moving to utilise the full extent of capabilities that are allowed for under legislation.
“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”
- Benjamin Franklin
Notification
Archival article sections accessible via the left hand navigation have not been updated for some time - simply due to resource constraints.
However, articles relating to these sections are still being published in the current events article stream.
Each new recent article covering subject matter on this topic will also link to most other articles on this site relating to said topic. (You can also navigate back in time through all articles published over the last ten years from the top and bottom of each page.)
When this website launched over a decade ago, things were comparatively quiet - in relation to the almost unmanageable daily avalanche of information coming in now.
The US Military Is Quietly Building SkyNet October 4 2017 | From: Zerohedge
Maybe Elon Musk had a point… The US’s military leaders have agreed on a strategy to guarantee the US military retains its global dominance during the twenty-first century: Connect everything with everything, as DefenseOne describes it.
The result? An unimaginably large cephapoloidal nervous system armed with the world’s most advanced weaponry, and in control of all military equipment belonging to the world’s most powerful army.
A networked military – an extreme take on the “internet of things” - would connect everything from F-35 jets to the Navy’s destroyers to the armor of the tanks crawling over the land to the devices carried by soldiers – every weapon would be connected. Every weapon, vehicle, and device connected, sharing data, constantly aware of the presence and state of every other node in a truly global network.
Of course, the development of these “smart” weapons should unnerve Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has repeatedly warned that AI and machine learning poses a greater threat to the future of the US than North Korea. If not properly regulated, Elon suggested that machines could turn against their human masters.
“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said.
AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff described their vision for a completely networked military in the newest iteration of their National Military Strategy, which lays out their plans for building the military's weapon of the future. Ironically, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said he had based the plan on a certain money-losing electric-car manufacturer.
Goldfein was particularly impressed by Tesla’s ability to remotely extend the battery life of vehicles as their owners fled Hurricane Irma earlier this month.
In recent months, the Joint Chiefs of Staff put together the newest version of their National Military Strategy. Unlike previous ones, it is classified. But executing a strategy requiring buy-in and collaboration across the services.
In recent months, at least two of the service chiefs talked openly about the strikingly similar direction that they are taking their forces. Standing before a sea of dark- blue uniforms at a September Air Force Association event in Maryland, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said he had “refined” his plans for the Air Force after discussions with the Joint Chiefs “as part of the creation of the classified military strategy.”
The future for the Air Force? The service needed to be more like a certain electric-car manufacturer.
“Every Tesla car is connected to every other Tesla car,” said Goldfein, referring to a presentation by Elon Musk about the ways his firm’s vehicles learn from their collective experience.
“If a Tesla is headed down the road and hits a pothole, every Tesla that’s behind it that’s self-driving, it will avoid the pothole, immediately. If you’re driving the car, it automatically adjusts your shocks in case you hit it, too.”
Goldfein waxed enthusiastically about how Tesla was able to remotely increase the battery capacity of cars in the U.S. Southeast to facilitate evacuation before the recent hurricanes.
“What would the world look like if we connected what we have in that way? If we looked at the world through a lens of a network as opposed to individual platforms, electronic jamming shared immediately, avoided automatically?
Every three minutes, a mobility aircraft takes off somewhere on the planet. Platforms are nodes in a network,” the Air Force chief said.
As DefenseOne explains, the idea of a networked military borrows from the “network centric warfare” concept that first emerged more than a decade ago. However, the concept that military leaders proposed in their latest review is less a strategy for increasing efficiency than a plan to connect all military equipment on a single network. The result would be better coordinated, faster, and more lethal operations in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.
The Air Force has begun making broad investments in data sharing. And its experiments with next-generation light tactical attack aircraft are as much about hardware as networks, he said.
“Not only what can I buy and what can they do, but more importantly, can they connect? Can they actually share? And can we tie it to a new network that’s based on sharable information that gets me beyond the challenges I have right now in terms of security?” Goldfein said.
The Air Force Science Board is studying how to control a network of military equipment including light attack aircraft, tanks and even unmanned drones. James Chow, the board’s new head, told DefenseOne the study would also consider how to connect to other services.
As DefenseOne explains, although most of the research into the networked military is being conducted by the Air Force, once implemented, any system would likely include weapons from across the military, like Navy destroyers, said Chow.
“Our scope would be in helping the Air Force to think about operations they would be conducting that would incorporate joint sensors and platforms, like destroyers, I think that has to be part of it. And that is within the charter of the study,” Chow said, adding that the study has “the highest priority level for Air Force leadership.”
The Marines are also looking at tanks that are digitally connected through their armor, according to Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, who leads Marine Corps Combat Development Command and serves as Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration. Navy leaders have also authorized research into connecting every object on the sea, land, air, space and in cyberspace.
This is no exaggeration. Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations, said during a Navy expo earlier this year that he’d eventually like to “network everything,” explaining that creating such a system would be crucial to maintaining US military dominance.
In an amusing aside, DefenseOne notes that, despite the obvious parallels, military leaders detest comparisons between their tech pet projects and anything from the plot of the Terminator franchise.
And while enabling instantaneous communication between military units would undoubtedly improve efficiency and tactical prowess, as Musk as pointed out, these projects should be undertaken cautiously.
Sloppy U.S. Spies Misused A Covert Network For Personal Shopping - And Other Stories From Internal NSA Documents September 27 2017 | From: TheIntercept
NSA agents successfully targeted “the entire business chain” connecting foreign cafes to the internet, bragged about an “all-out effort” to spy on liberated Iraq, and began systematically trying to break into virtual private networks, according to a set of internal agency news reports dating to the first half of 2005.
In this May 1, 2003 file photo, President George W. Bush gives a “thumbs-up” sign after declaring the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast
British spies, meanwhile, were made to begin providing new details about their informants via a system of “Intelligence Source Descriptors” created in response to intelligence failures in Iraq. Hungary and the Czech Republic pulled closer to the National Security Agency.
And future Intercept backer Pierre Omidyar visited NSA headquarters for an internal conference panel on “human networking” and open-source intelligence.
These stories and more are contained in a batch of 294 articles from SIDtoday, the internal news website of the NSA’s core Signals Intelligence Directorate. The Intercept is publishing the articles in redacted form as part of an ongoing project to release material from the files provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In addition to the aforementioned highlights, summarized in further detail below, the documents show how the NSA greatly expanded a secret eavesdropping partnership with Ethiopia’s draconian security forces in the Horn of Africa, as detailed in an investigation by longtime Intercept contributor Nick Turse.
They describe the NSA’s operations at a base in Digby, England, where the agency worked with its British counterpart GCHQ to help direct drones in the Middle East and tap into communications through the Arab Spring uprisings, according to a separate article by Intercept reporter Ryan Gallagher.
And they show how the NSA and GCHQ thwarted encryption systems used to protect peer-to-peer file sharing through the apps Kazaa and eDonkey, as explained here by Intercept technologist Micah Lee.
NSA did not comment for this article.
American Intelligence Agents Outed Themselves Online
Members of the U.S. intelligence community routinely thwarted a system designed to mask their identities online by using it for personal shopping and to log on to websites, according to an NSA information technology manager.
The system, called “AIRGAP,” was run by “one of the world’s largest ISPs” and created around 1998 at the behest of the NSA, according to NSA Internet Program Manager Charlie Speight, writing in SIDtoday. Its purpose was to allow “non-attribution internet access,” Speight added, meaning that intelligence analysts could surf the internet without revealing that they were coming from U.S. spy agencies. By 2005, it was used by the whole U.S. intelligence community.
One early concern about the firewall was that it funneled all internet traffic through a single IP address, meaning that if any activity on the address was revealed to be associated with U.S. spies, a broad swath of other activity could then be attributed to other U.S. spies.
More IP addresses were subsequently added, but “occasionally we find that the ISP reverts to one address, or does not effectively rotate those assigned,” Speight wrote.
Speight added that the “greater security concern” was the very intelligence agents the system was designed to protect.
“Despite rules and warnings to the contrary, all too frequently users will use AIRGAP for registering on web sites or for services, logging into other sites and services and even ordering personal items from on-line vendors,” Speight wrote in a classified passage.
“By doing so, these users reveal information about themselves and, potentially, other users on the network. So much for ‘non-attribution.'”
This sort of sloppiness mirrors behavior that has undermined Russian intelligence operatives. A slide presentation by Canadian intelligence, dating to 2011 or later, labeled as “morons” members of a Russian hacking group code-named “MAKERSMARK,” who thwarted a “really well-designed” system to hide their identities by using it to log on to their personal social and email accounts.
Edward Snowden: The Deep State & Revolution - Why we need to become Active Today
The two situations are not perfectly comparable; the U.S. system was managed as part of a network for obtaining unclassified information, while the Russian system was used for the more sensitive activity of staging hack attacks.
But Speight hinted at aggressive use of the U.S. system, writing in his piece that the NSA had begun “using AIRGAP for reasons and in volumes not intended in its formation” - the agency thus began developing its own separate firewall.
The NSA had systems with the same goal as AIRGAP - anonymization - but for phone calls. According to a February 2005 SIDtoday article, the NSA controlled 40,000 telephone numbers, but these were almost all prefixed with area- and exchange-code combinations that were publicly associated with the agency.
An analyst who needed to make a public phone call without leaking their affiliation could use “anonymous telephones,” most of them registered to Department of Defense, or “cover telephones,” registered using alias names and P.O. boxes. No security protocol lapses were described in connection with the old-fashioned voice networks.
Iraqi youth surf the web at an internet cafe in Baghdad’s impoverished district of Sadr City, Nov. 15 2007
NSA Targeted “the Entire Business Chain” to Spy on Internet Cafes
While hiding, or at least trying to hide, its own online operations, the NSA launched an all-encompassing campaign to trace online activity in internet cafes, down to specific seats.
A program called “MASTERSHAKE” accomplished this by exploiting equipment used by the cafes, including satellite internet modems, according to top-secret information reported by SIDtoday.
“MASTERSHAKE targets the entire business chain, from manufacturer to Internet café installation, to ascertain any and all available data regarding … geolocation, the network connectivity of the modem, as well as the actual physical location of the installation,” according to SIDtoday.
MASTERSHAKE data was “enriched” with other information, including “geolocatable phone events,” as well as intelligence from throughout the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate and from the agency’s XKeyscore search system.
The NSA knew the precise location of over 400 internet cafes. For over 50 of these cafes, it could locate a target to a specific seat within the cafe. One goal of the monitoring was to hunt down Al Qaeda leaders, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
SIDtoday focused on the use of MASTERSHAKE in Iraq, describing an incident in the city of Ramadi where two “counterterrorism targets” began using a messenger service at an internet cafe, and “within about 15 minutes the two men were arrested.” But it also indicated the system was used more broadly, “in the Middle East and Africa.”
As the Intercept previously reported, the NSA has surveilled internet cafes in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, as detailed in agency documents.
Sunni Arab member of Iraqi Transitional National Assembly and a candidate for the post of parliament speaker Misha’an al-Juburi speaks on the phone April 2, 2005 in Baghdad
An “All-Out Effort” To Spy on Liberated Iraq
The NSA’s surveillance against Iraqis went far beyond cafe computers. Two years after President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech and a year after the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over the reins to the Iraqi Interim Government, the agency was trying to tap the nation’s communications - and enlist friendly Iraqis and the new government to do likewise.
In a top-secret SIDtoday report, an NSA “data acquisition lead” in Baghdad described “an all-out effort to penetrate Iraqi networks using everything in the tool box of the most sophisticated SIGINT agency in the world.” The “very forward-leaning and aggressive” collection effort brought “our technology to bear at the optimum access points” in the country.
The identity of those access points is hinted at by the list of people the NSA staffer met with as the “field rep on a number of projects”: “Iraqi government personnel engaged in telecommunications and IT issues for Iraq; small and medium sized Iraqi communications contractors; the CEO’s and Chief Technical Officers of the major Iraqi telecommunications service providers; [and] Iraqi cabinet level officials,” among others.
Another article confirmed the NSA was spying on Iraqi telecommunications, describing a “dramatic drop” in information the agency collected from links carrying mobile phone traffic between Fallujah and northern Baghdad and a consequent gap in intelligence gathering. A team from the NSA and CIA was able to restore the collection within two weeks by targeting microwave signals carrying the traffic.
In addition to its own electronic spying within Iraq, the NSA sought to rebuild the country’s ability to spy on itself through another joint project with the CIA, along with GCHQ. The Western intelligence entities would build a new Iraqi spy agency, dubbed the Iraq SIGINT Element, according to another SIDtoday article.
The Iraqi SIGINT Element’s expertise would come, of course, from veterans of Saddam Hussein’s regime; the NSA and GCHQ made a list of candidates “gleaned from years of targeting the Iraqi civil and military SIGINT units,” SIDtoday reported. The former targets were the new recruits.
The CIA assisted in the vetting process with polygraphers, psychologists, and background checks, and the NSA trained the selected candidates on “how we do SIGINT.” The new intelligence agents’ first assignment was to find communications of former Saddam “elements” and insurgents in Baghdad. They went covertly into Baghdad neighborhoods, which U.S. and U.K. forces were unable to do.
It was at the behest of the director of central intelligence that the NSA “moved aggressively to help [Iraq] establish and enhance their signals intelligence capabilities,” SIDtoday reported separately. A similar effort was underway in Afghanistan. “Both relationships come with risks, but the overall benefit to U.S. objectives in the region outweighs these risks,” wrote an NSA foreign affairs staff officer.
An Iraqi soldier checks the detonator on spot where an improvised explosive device blew up as a convoy of the 1st battalion 327th infantry regiment was driving along a country road on the outskirts of the northern city of Hawija, Dec. 25, 2005
Targeting Bombers in Iraq
Mass surveillance efforts in Iraq were part of a broader NSA effort to address the consequences of the coalition’s victory over Saddam Hussein. Immediately after the Ba’athist government fell to the invading forces in 2003, signals intelligence collection on the regime ceased to exist.
NSA staff, some of whom had been monitoring the country for more than a decade, woke up to “no more audio cuts, no more transcripts … no more product reports,” according to an account in SIDtoday.
One official wondered, “Will we lose resources because of our success?” Postwar insurgency and sectarian strife ensured this was not the case.
For example, an NSA team set about thwarting detonation systems for bombs set by insurgents. The bombs, known within the U.S. military as improvised explosive devices, were triggered from a distance, often using high-powered cordless phone systems, in which a common base station, controlled by a triggerman, connects to a cluster of wireless handsets.
The team devised a way to locate triggermen: Intercepting and identifying security codes emitted by captured handsets. The codes, intended to tether a handset to a particular base station, could then be used to locate base stations, resulting in military targeting and “hopefully, the IED makers neutralized,” SIDtoday stated.
The NSA may have had a chance to deploy this technique at the end of January 2005, when Iraq’s first parliamentary elections took place. An article in SIDtoday said that signals intelligence helped prevent 50 to 60 suicide bombers from making it into polling centers. Still, 285 other insurgent attacks occurred that day, and CNN reported several incidents of suicide bombings that hit police officers and Iraqis waiting to vote.
How British Spies Were Made To Atone for Bad Iraq Intel
In Iraq and elsewhere, the NSA expanded the scope of its intelligence sharing to U.S. government “customers,” as described in a January 2005 article, in which an NSA staffer in Baghdad read a new sharing guideline aloud to a hesitant colleague: “It’s OK to talk about, show and share evaluated, minimized unpublished SIGINT to customers/partners in order to facilitate analytic collaboration.”
Even amid the aggressive intelligence sharing, the NSA was taking note of what could happen when such sharing went terribly wrong. A SIDtoday story about a British government inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, the Butler Review, describes how the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ was now required to provide “Intelligence Source Descriptors” on all intel reports.
This requirement came in response to the finding that the British foreign spying agency, MI6, did not adequately check human sources and relied on third-hand reporting about Iraqi chemical weapons, including “seriously flawed” information from “another country’s intelligence service.”
The new British source descriptors would include identification of sources by name or role along with judgments on whether the source had direct or indirect access to the information reported. The GCHQ descriptor would also indicate whether a source is “reliable,” “unknown,” or “uncertain” as to reliability. “There are no plans at present to use a like program on NSA reports,” SIDtoday reported.
Despite reporting on fallout from the U.K. postwar review, SIDtoday did not cover a U.S. presidential commission that prominently reported in March 2005 on how the American intelligence community was “dead wrong” in its prewar assessment of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Czech External Intelligence Service Headquarters (ÚZSI)
NSA Works with Hungary, Pakistan, Ethiopia - and an Eager Czech Republic
In parallel with its efforts to share information with more U.S. government and intelligence agencies, the NSA also forged connections with foreign partners whose collaboration would have, in previous decades, seemed inconceivable.
In early 2005, the NSA entered into a partnership with Hungary’s Military Intelligence Office, inviting the spy agency to “work with NSA as part of our extended SIGINT enterprise,” according to SIDtoday, and “write SIGINT reports for dissemination through the NSA system to our intelligence community customers.” The partnership allowed the NSA to tap into the Hungarian agency’s “unique access to Serbian and Ukrainian military targets.”
A contemporaneous NSA visit to the Czech Republic, as described in SIDtoday, showed how such “third party” partnerships can come to fruition. The trip was conducted to establish whether the NSA should partner with the Czech External Intelligence Service, or ÚZSI, which wanted to tap NSA expertise “on many technical issues.” In order to win over the Americans, spy agency “personnel essentially opened the door to their SIGINT vault,” displaying an “exceptional degree of openness.”
The NSA team came away impressed, judging ÚZSI “exceptionally good at analysis of material associated with Russian [counterintelligence] targets,” and impressed with the agency’s “very good analytic effort against Russian and Ukrainian HF networks” and “overall levels of sophistication, knowledge, practical experience, ingenuity and enthusiasm that allow them to overcome many financial and equipment shortfalls.”
Perhaps best of all, ÚZSI “has not requested financial support from the NSA.” The Czech Republic eventually became a third-party partner.
A March 2005 SIDtoday article, summarizing a briefing from the NSA’s principal director for foreign affairs, alluded to agency “relationships” with Pakistan and Ethiopia, “work” with Iraq (discussed elsewhere in this article) and Afghanistan, and a “multinational collaboration in the Pacific.”
More generally, third parties became vital at this time simply for providing additional staffing and coverage. For instance, after the U.S. closed several bases, the NSA developed a reliance on third-party partners to participate in High Frequency Directional Finding networks for locating the origins of targeted radio signals.
And the U.S. partnered with Hungary’s military intelligence organization in part because it “has been instrumental in providing intelligence that answers high-priority CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) requirements that NSA would otherwise not be able to answer due to manpower constraints.”
Intercept Backer Spoke at NSA Headquarters
Back in the U.S., the NSA’s post-9/11 “transformation,” initiated by Director Michael Hayden, promoted information sharing and collaboration to the traditionally closed community at Fort Meade. Invitations to participate at agency seminars and conferences were made not just to partners from the intelligence and military communities, but also to members of private industry and academia.
An announcement in SIDtoday for the third annual Analysis Conference from the NSA’s Analysis and Production division proclaimed the need to “keep communications open and leverage our partners’ insights.” Speakers at the May 2005 event, held at agency headquarters, included authors, U.S. senators, corporate executives, and journalists.
One “high-powered panel” at the conference on “human networking” featured eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who would go on to provide funding for The Intercept, which covers and is frequently critical of the NSA.
A separate SIDtoday article touting the panel indicated that corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly also participated and that panelists were recruited through the Global Business Network, a consulting firm specializing in scenario-based forecasting.
The GBN had been asked to harness its network of experts, “most of whom have had no previous involvement with the intelligence community,” to apply strategies from “the competitive marketplace” to NSA challenges.
Omidyar told The Intercept that the GBN:
“Asked me to participate in an unclassified meeting at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade on the topic of ‘open source’ intelligence. My recollection of the people I met there is that they were very smart and genuinely interested in bringing outside ideas into the agency. I stayed involved with the GBN for some time after that meeting but when they approached me many months later to participate in additional meetings with the NSA, I declined.
The invitation was made after news broke in December 2005 about the agency’s ‘warrantless wiretapping’ - and those events were deeply concerning to me. In addition, I didn’t have anything else to add beyond what I had already shared. I was not asked to meet with the NSA again after declining that invitation.”
Omidyar said he was not paid for his appearance.
India tested its medium-range submarine-launched ballistic missile system. It was launched from a secret location in the Bay of Bengal from a depth of 50 meters
Advanced Word on Indian Nuclear Weapons
A series of nuclear weapons tests conducted by India in the spring of 1998 took the intelligence community by surprise, prompting an internal investigation into why these tests had not been foreseen; a subsequent report was harshly critical of the U.S. intelligence community. A similar lapse in data gathering would not happen again in 2005.
An Australian NSA site, RAINFALL, isolated a signal it suspected was associated with an Indian nuclear facility, according to SIDtoday. Collaboration between RAINFALL and two NSA stations in Thailand (INDRA and LEMONWOOD) confirmed the source of the signals and allowed for the interception of information about several new Indian missile initiatives.
Although these missile systems did not come to public attention for several more years (the Sagarika submarine-launched ballistic missile was first tested in 2008), the NSA’s access to these signals gave them foreknowledge of their Third Party SIGINT partner’s (see last image) actions.
Attacking VPNs
An NSA working group focused on virtual private networks, or VPNs, was established in November 2004 to “conduct systematic and thorough SIGINT Development of VPN communications (typically encrypted),” SIDtoday reported - meaning that the agency wanted to break into the networks.
The group published regular “VPN Target Activity Reports” on a large number of countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Russia, and China, as well as “specific financial, governmental, communication service providers and international organizations.” These reports may help analysts “exploit targets’ VPNs more successfully.”
Women at the NSA
Sonia Kovalevsky Days take place at schools and colleges nationwide, with competitions and talks to encourage young women to pursue careers in mathematics. Although the events’ namesake was a radical socialist and pioneering female mathematician, members of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society participated as part of the agency’s effort to recruit more female mathematicians.
The NSA believed itself to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, but between 1987 to 1993, only one of the 30 math Ph.D.s the agency hired identified as a woman, and only 26 percent of women hired into the agency’s mathematics community had an advanced degree, according to SIDtoday.
After the Women in Mathematics Society was formed, from 1994 through 2005, about 38 percent of women mathematicians hired into NSA had a doctoral degree and 27 percent held a master’s degree.
Hold the Spam, Please
“Spam affects NSA by impeding our collection, processing and storage of [Digital Network Intelligence] traffic,” said the author of a February 2005 SIDtoday article. “Unfortunately, filtering out spam has proven to be an extremely difficult and cumbersome task.”According to the author, analysts developed technology that tagged “an average of 150,000 spam sessions a day,” which greatly reduced the amount of spam that shows up in “daily searches” of intercepted emails.
Correction: September 13, 2017, 9:15 p.m. - Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story gave an incorrect year for the NSA’s third annual Analysis Conference; the event occurred in May 2005, not May 2015.
Google, Tech Giants Threaten To Shut Down ‘Free Speech’ Social Site & Reason: It’s Time To Rein In Warrantless Domestic Spying Before It’s Too Late September 22 | From: Infowars / TechnocracyNews Google has monopoly on flow of information: Search engine giant Google and other tech platforms have threatened to shut down free-speech social media site Gab in the name of fighting “hate speech.”
Gab, a social media platform known as a free speech oasis, was just recently ordered to transfer their Australian domain elsewhere or face shutdown.
“Gab’s domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it. The free and open web is in danger,” the website tweeted.
Asia Registry is poised to shut down the pro-1st Amendment website because it claims Gab “violates Australian federal and state anti-discrimination laws, which prohibit public vilification on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic origin,” and accuses the website of being “discriminatory and hateful.”
Google has already booted Gab off the Google Play store, also citing violations of their “hate speech policies,” which has prompted Gab to sue the tech giant for violating anti-trust laws.
“Google is the biggest threat to the free flow of information,” Gab chief executive Andrew Torba said in a statement.
“Gab started to fight against the big tech companies in the marketplace, and their monopolistic conduct has forced us to bring the fight to the courtroom.”
Gab alleges in the lawsuit that “Google deprives competitors, on a discriminatory basis, of access to the App Store, which an essential facility or resource.”
Google fired back, calling the lawsuit “baseless” and asserting that Gab needed “to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people,” to use the Play Store.
As we reported, Google has been caught censoring information on numerous occasions, and has even admitted to censoring Infowars despite providing no evidence of “hate speech.”
Google's Worst Nightmare
Jack Posobiec has launched the website marchongoogle.com in an attempt to raise awareness that Google is rigging algorithms to manipulate it's search results in what they see as a favorable manner.
Reason: It’s Time To Rein In Warrantless Domestic Spying Before It’s Too Late
Intelligence agencies that are run by Technocrats are data hoarders who are compelled to collect everything that is collectible, illegal or not. We have stated many times that American intelligence agencies have long-since gone rogue, becoming unresponsive to courts and legislators alike.
They must be stopped, at all costs. This is not about intelligence to keep Americans safe, but rather about building a surveillance network that will eventually lead to Scientific Dictatorship. Listen to the video in this article! - TN Editor
As former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed to the world in 2013, the U.S. government routinely spies on its own citizens.
“I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president,” Snowden told the journalists crowded into his hotel room before the publication of his leaked documents.
The leaks exposed lies from government officials about the mass surveillance of American citizens, with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifying before Congress that the NSA didn’t “wittingly” collect any data on millions of Americans.
Four years after the Snowden leaks, the government is still collecting Americans’ private information. Though the NSA claims it ended bulk collection of domestic phone calls, the agency is still operating several other far-reaching domestic spying programs.
Now there’s a way to end these unconstitutional practices. The NSA gets its authority to spy on U.S. Citizens from Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The law will expire this year after it hits its five-year sunset. Lawmakers will soon be deliberating over whether to renew Section 702 for another five or maybe even make it permanent.
Watch the video above to see why it’s vital that they let Section 702 lapse.
Google Is NSA September 16 2017 | From: Geopolitics
Google wants to be Big Brother’s eyeballs on you. All US internet gurus knew this since before the NSA was found out spying on everybody.
But now the Mountain View boys are more determined than ever to filter your information, and to obliterate any semblance of truth reaching people.
If I had led into an article with that paragraph even five years ago, I’d have been instantly labeled a “conspiracy theorist” or worse. How about know dear reader?
Is the idea the technocrats and their huge monied handlers want to run you crazy? I didn’t think so. But if you need proof beyond the obvious, Google’s 160-page handbook tells us all exactly how they plan to spoon feed us only “their” news.
The lengthy handbook is a heavy read for the average person, but the book does lay out an Orwellian machination unlike anything seen since the Nazi propaganda machine of Hitler. Pay close attention to the “instructional” on page 108 where Google dictates who does and does not meet rating criteria.
The section under Fails to Meet (FailsM) is a steamrolling of the free press, and suggested hiding certain kinds of sites:
"Pages that directly contradict well established historical facts (e.g., unsubstantiated conspiracy theories), unless the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”
As per usual, Google has obscured its real intentions with the idea some super smart algorithm is “filtering” or “learning” results to help your life be better. Once again Google supposes to do “what is good for us” by destroying some sources and propping up others.
Using terms like “search quality rating guidelines” and “page quality rating guidelines” the little Machiavellis at Google provide justification for controlling what you see and read on the web. Censorship and monopolization of internet information and business – this is the case against the Mountain View boys this time.
Then there’s the section concerning how Google will rank the best of the best news sites entitled “A High Level of Expertise / Authoritativeness / Trustworthiness (EAT)”. The acronym should clue you that Google search users are about to be fed some bullshit truth.
“High Quality Pages” for the Google oligarchs means that either the page owner pays Google through the mouth, or that the site in question serves Google’s masters well – period. At the top of this matrix of sources are newspapers (High News 1) like The Washington Post and New York Times, followed by the articles within those pages (High News 2).
On down the list of authority pages are government sites like the US State Department and White House, and then pages categorized (believe it or not) “High Humor”.
So, Google has factored out the importance of truth or even the importance of the news story itself, in favor of “who” wrote the story and the “reality” Google wants you to accept – Big Brother’s network – end of story.
Melissa Dykes of Truth Stream Media made a video about the new Big Brother effort, and Government Slaves did their take as well. And the latter even suggests alternatives to using Google Search for those who refusing the totalitarian tendencies we see headed our way these days.
For people who had rather boycott the imminent evil such as Yandex, and DuckDuckGo. Government Slaves also lists 400 sites for independent news outside Google’s MATIX. My advice for everyone is to start making the transition away from Google and Facebook now.
My own vast experience in dealing with these tech people has revealed people with no morals whatsoever, people willing to do anything necessary to perpetuate their dominance in digital.
Google has destroyed millions of people’s livelihoods, broken its own code, lawyers itself around anti-trust and fair practice rules, avoided taxes, and colluded against the people of the United States with the intelligence agencies.
All these assertions are not just this writer’s ramblings. Back in 2014 John W. Whitehead wrote about the NSA and Google for the Huffington Post:
"Just look around you. It’s happened already. Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, “we the people” have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again.”
August 29th the notorious Zero Hedge creator, Tyler Durden wrote a piece entitled “Why Google Made The NSA”, which revealed a project called INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowd-funded investigative journalism project that had released a story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information.
You read that correctly.
My past assertions that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were “lifted up” by unseen money were probably correct. While I presumed George Soros or Rockefeller being behind, it’s conceivable Uncle Sam was the spook in the woodpile. The Zero hedge story delves deep into a “deep state” we never imagined in our worst nightmares.
The report unveils how Pentagon Highlands Forum’s more or less taking over tech giants like Google to pursue mass surveillance. Furthermore, the report shows how the intelligence community has played a key role in secret efforts to manipulate the media and the public.
The endless crisis and war we find ourselves in, is in large part because of the efforts of Google and the other technocratic institutions. In on section the author frames how the Obama administration really consolidated this “Big Brother” control:
"Under Obama, the nexus of corporate, industry, and financial power represented by the interests that participate in the Pentagon Highlands Forum has consolidated itself to an unprecedented degree.”
These people refer to themselves as “the gatekeepers”. Their arrogance is only exceeded by their amoral agnosticism.
The successes of the information age, Silicon Valley’s dubious venture capital bonanzas, the mysterious ways in which fairly ordinary innovators were propelling into the limelight warns us to the underlying swamp Donald Trump described.
But it is the immensity of the network that should clue us. Imagine a new president taking office and fending off attacks as best he could, only to discover that the whole machine of the US government being under such a controlling influence.
It’s easy to theorize after learning all this, how Trump did an about face on so many issues. He must have been overwhelmed. Or, he was part of the plan all along. [Comment: Author is out of the loop, clearly.]
Finally, if we expand on this news and include other technocrats like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, then understanding world crises caused by bad US policy becomes simpler. It’s a corporation – all of it is a corporation for war and friction. Bezos walking with former Marine General and current Secretary of Defense, “Mad Dog” Mattis at Amazon is symbolic.
Trump’s posture with Israel, the Saudis, even on domestic policy tells us those campaign promises sank in the wake of a deep state ship at full steam forward. [Comment: No; it is just that the author is not aware of the strategies in play - things are not as they seem.]
If we allow Google and other such players to continue unchecked….
Well, you are as capable as I of completing that sentence. I only pray we are not too late.
Spies, Cops, And Corporate ‘Security’ Profiteers Gathered In Washington + Warning About ‘Ominous’ Google Censorship Of Political Content September 13 2017 | From: PrivacySOS / Infowars
On September 11, the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thousands of spies, police officers, prosecutors, and surveillance profiteers gathered in Washington D.C. for a spying technology extravaganza known as ISS World Americas.
On its website, the event organizers describe ISS World Americas as
"The world’s largest gathering of Americas Law Enforcement, Homeland Security, Defense, Public Safety and other members of the Government Intelligence Community as well as Telecom Operators responsible for cyber threat intelligence gathering, DarkNet monitoring, lawful interception and cybercrime investigations.
ISS World Programs present the methodologies and tools for Law Enforcement, Public Safety and Government Intelligence Communities in the fight against drug trafficking, cyber money laundering, human trafficking, terrorism and other criminal activities conducted over today’s Telecommunications networks, the Internet and Social Networks."
In other words, ISS World Americas is where US and Latin American cops and spies go to exchange tips and learn new tricks about how to conduct electronic surveillance. It’s also where corporations go to hawk their wares to an industry worth billions of dollars a year, and growing.
While the conference claims to instruct in “lawful interception” techniques, the conference’s agenda at a glance includes a number of sessions about mass surveillance.
Among them:
“Recognizing Traffic Data and digital profiling”
“Understanding ISS Product Deployments in Telecommunication Networks for Lawful Interception and Mass Surveillance”
“Introduction to Wirelines and IP Infrastructure and Related ISS Products for Lawful Interception and Mass Surveillance”
“Understanding Mobile Wireless Infrastructure, and Related ISS Products for Lawful Interception and Mass Surveillance”
“Understanding the Internet Over-the-Top (OTT) Services and Related ISS Products for Lawful Interception and Mass Surveillance”
“Demystifying the Dark Web through Automated Data Monitoring, Collection, and Intelligence Production”
“Delivering a National Scale Data Intelligence Capability”
The conference also features a number of sessions on law enforcement hacking:
“Defeating Network Encryption: What Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community Needs [sic] to Understand,” in which agents will learn how to counter the widespread use of encrypted messaging systems like WhatsApp and “defeat network encryption including cellular, Wi-Fi, MITM attacks, IT intrusion and more.”
“IP Address Resolution - Breaking the Anonymity of Network Address Translation”
Other sessions covered topics like undercover online investigations, cell phone surveillance and data exfiltration, cryptocurrencies, the surveillance implications of 4G/5G signaling replacing SS7, and the anonymizing web browser Tor.
Former Tor executive director Andrew Lewman delivered a talk on Tor, in which he discussed, among other things, what law enforcement can do to “counter TOR 2.0.”
Law enforcement, military, and intelligence officials could attend the conference for $1,295.
Warning About ‘Ominous’ Google Censorship Of Political Content
‘Somebody needs to keep track of what Google is doing.'
Tucker Carlson slammed Google’s apparent censorship of content not politically agreeable to them company.
Kiwis Urged To Check And Change Passwords & Social Media Is A Tool Of The CIA: “Facebook, Google And Other Social Media Used To Spy On People” September 4 2017 | From: Scoop / GlobalResearch
World’s Biggest Spambot Dump: New Zealanders urged to check and change passwords.
Recently it was reported that more than 700 million email addresses, and a number of passwords, have been leaked in what is already being referred to as one of the largest spambot dumps the world has ever seen.
At present, it is believed the data dump originated via a spambot called Onliner however this is yet to be verified. You can check if your email address has been affected at haveibeenpwned.com.
Security experts are advising those affected to change their passwords immediately to reduce the risk of further penetration.
This recommendation begs the question – what makes a secure password?
Aura Information Security’s general manager, Peter Bailey says, "While security experts have been talking to people about securing their passwords for years, it is still one of the easiest points of access for hackers to use. Too often passwords are written down, reused or too easy to hack."
Passwords are the gateway to you and your companies’ private materials, but the importance of password security is often overlooked – which can lead to increased cyber security risk for businesses.
Here are six top tips on how to maximise your business’ password security from Aura Information Security’s Peter Bailey:
1. Use a Password Manager
A good password manager, which is essentially a vault that stores all your passwords in one place and is protected by a master password, will help to make the task setting strong, different passwords for multiple accounts far easier.
These password managers rely on you setting a very strong master password, so Aura recommends using a “passphrase” as this master password – that is, a sequence of four or five words.
These days, it’s length, not complexity, that makes a good password, so try to choose longer words that aren’t predictable or easy to guess. Fortunately, it will be the last password you have to remember, as most password managers include password generators to create strong (long and complex) passwords for you, so you’ll never have to look at or type in another password again.
There are lots of options out there, ranging from online solutions such as 1Password or LastPass, to the more technical solutions such as KeePass. Most solutions provide mobile apps as well, so you can manage your passwords on your iOS or android devices too.
2. Use Two-Factor Authentication Where it is Available
Where two-factor authentication is offered (even Facebook offers it days), make use of it. Two-factor authentication combines username and password (factor one) with a second level of verification, like a TXT code to your mobile or a 2FA code generator such as Google Authenticator (factor two).
3. Don’t Reuse Passwords
If a hacker does manage to access your business password, having the same password for everything could spell disaster.
The same goes for employee passwords, sharing passwords between their personal and business accounts increases the chances that the password could be compromised. It’s best practise to have multiple passwords, to minimise the potential impact on your business should one password be discovered.
4. Never Disclose or Share Your Credentials
Cyber criminals are getting more and more sophisticated, but in our experience the same types of tricks that have been used for years by hackers are still the most effective – and that is social engineering.
In other words, tricking an employee into clicking on an infected link, revealing a user name and password or paying an invoice that looks like it has come from a legitimate source.
Perhaps our biggest piece of advice is that good security starts with staff education and effective security policies – and that includes never revealing your passwords to anyone, or including passwords in documentation (emails, work instructions, application user guide etc.).
5. Ensure your Employees Understand Cyber Security
Most security breaches can be attributed to employee error…or ignorance. Employees who use weak passwords or use the same password across personal and work accounts can prove to be the weak spot that hackers use to penetrate your business.
To ensure your business fosters a culture of cybersecurity awareness, regular training and education is key.
If you don’t have a CISO to help lead the charge, there are some great online tools and employee checklists available from sites such as ConnectSmart.govt.nz and cert.govt.nz. Aura also recently launched its e-learning tool, which is designed to provide businesses with the ability to train and educate staff whilst also identifying areas for improvement.
6. Make Your Password Complex, But Easy to Remember
Previous advice has recommended combining upper and lower case letters, using number and symbols when creating your password. The inability for people to remember these complex passwords ends up putting individuals at higher risk of cyber hacks – by writing down your password in order to actually remember it, you’re opening yourself up to more threat.
Instead, think of an easy to remember phrase or word combination. Lyrics of a song, a short quote from a movie or book, or even a dinner dish are good options to make your password complex enough to deter hackers, but still easy to remember.
Social Media Is A Tool Of The CIA: “Facebook, Google And Other Social Media Used To Spy On People”
A CBS news article published in 2011 entitled “Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA. Seriously” reveals the “unspoken truth” which the mainstream media including CBS have failed to address.
The CIA is “using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people.”
This article published by CBS refutes the lies of the MSM (and CBS). It confirms the insidious relationship between the CIA, the Search Engines, Social Media and major advertising conglomerates:
“You don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe that the CIA is using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people. That’s because the CIA publishes a helpful list of press releases [link inactive] on all the social media ventures it sponsors, via its technology investment arm In-Q-Tel. … “
The report acknowledges that “privacy” is threatened by the advertisers, yet at the same time these advertisers are “in bed with the CIA”, acting on behalf and in liaison with US intelligence.
The Privatization of Spying
Spying on individuals is a highly profitable undertaking for private companies on contract to the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security. The CBS report suggests in no uncertain terms that the personal information pertaining to millions of Americans collected by one of the World’s largest ad agencies is sold to the CIA.
"THE INVESTMENT ARMS of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time - and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents - both present and still-to-come.
In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
Purge of Conservative Sites and Platforms Has Begun
The masters of social media are doing their best to stop the growth of the new conservative media.
Freedom of Expression
Social Media and Search engines are being used to Spy on Americans! But not only on Americans. The process of personal data collection is worldwide.
What is at stake, however, is not only the issue of “Privacy”. The online search engines also constitute an instrument of online media censorship.
Independent online media is targeted. Freedom of Expression on internet based news outlets is being routinely shunted by Google:
“New data compiled by the World Socialist Web Site, with the assistance of other Internet-based news outlets and search technology experts, proves that a massive loss of readership observed by socialist, anti-war and progressive web sites over the past three months has been caused by a cumulative 45 percent decrease in traffic from Google
One of the main threats to privacy comes from advertisers, who want to track everything consumers do on the web and scrape their online accounts for personal information. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, to learn that theCIA and the worlds largest ad agency network, WPP (WPPGY), have been in bed together on a social media data-mining venture since at least January 2009.
WPP currently claims to own the world’s largest database of unique individual profiles - including demographic, financial, purchase and geographic histories. WPP’s Visible Technologies unit took an investment from In-Q-Tel in fall of 2009. Visible Technologies develops tools that can scan social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. …
Google is already helping the government write, and rewrite, history. Here, from its transparency report, are some stats on the amount of information it has either given to the government or wiped from the web based on requests by U.S. agencies:
4,601 requests from U.S. government agencies for “user data“
Google complied with government requests for user data 94% of the time.
Google complied with content removal requests 87% of the time.
15 requests were from “executive, police etc.”
1 was a national security request.
How The CIA Spies On Your Everyday Life, According To WikiLeaks August 17 2017 | From: RT
WikiLeaks’ latest release from the Vault 7 series of CIA leaks, sheds more light on how ordinary people can be easily tracked and targeted by the US intelligence agency through everyday electronic devices.
Since March 7, WikiLeaks has revealed CIA hacking techniques used to weaponize mobile phones, conduct surveillance via smart TVs, and load and execute malware on a ‘target machine’.
In light of Thursday’s 20th release from Vault 7, RT looks back at the most explosive revelations from the CIA’s hacking arsenal, showing how the intelligence agency could spy on you in your own home.
Home Security Systems
The ‘Dumbo’ program is purportedly designed to manipulate home security systems, altering the functionality of webcams and microphones on Microsoft Windows-operating systems and corrupting video recordings.
WikiLeaks suggested that this allows the operator to create fake – or destroy real – evidence of their intrusion into the device.
Smart TVs
Many of the exploits revealed through the leaked Vault 7 documents appear designed to target ordinary individuals through commonly used devices.
The CIA allegedly has access to a range of tools that even target Samsung TVs under its ‘Weeping Angel’ program. The project involves infiltrating the smart TVs to transform them into covert microphones, which can record and store audio.
Google’s Android operating system was found to have 24 ‘zero days’ – the codename used by the CIA for tools to identify and exploit vulnerabilities and secretly collect data on individuals.
The OS is used in 85 percent of the world’s smart phones, including Samsung and Sony.
By exploiting gaps in the OS, it’s possible to access data from social messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Weibo, Telegram and Signal before encryption is applied.
Another program appears specifically designed to target mobile devices running Android 4.0 to 4.3, allowing a third party to intercept and redirect SMS messages.
Apple products are not immune to the CIA’s hacking tools either. In fact, Vault 7 revealed a specific division dedicated to the hacking of Apple devices .
A tool known as ‘NightSkies’ specifically targets Apple products including the iPhone and Macbook Air. It purportedly even allows the CIA to infiltrate factory-fresh iPhones and track and control them remotely, providing “full remote command and control.”
WiFi
WiFi can be easily exploited by the agency for spying, according to a number of leaks. One program called Cherry Blossom allegedly targets WiFi devices to monitor, control and manipulate the Internet traffic of connected users.
No physical access is needed to implant the firmware on a wireless device, as some devices allow their firmware to be upgraded over a wireless link.
Another malware called Elsa tracks WiFi-enabled devices running Microsoft Windows, allowing the CIA to gather location data on a target’s device and monitor their patterns and habits.
The malware allows the CIA to track the geo-location of wifi-enabled devices even when they are not connected to the internet.
Microsoft
Most of the malware referenced throughout the leaks is designed for use on the widely popular Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Many of these programs focus on uploading the malware via removable devices such as USB drives. Some, such as the ‘brutal kangaroo’ project, are designed to hide themselves from detection, and can even infect devices that have never been connected to the internet by air gap jumping.
GCSB 'Had No Idea' Spy Gear Was Still Targeting Kim Dotcom August 8 2017 | From: NewZealandHerald
The GCSB lost control of its surveillance technology and wasn't aware its systems continued spying on Kim Dotcom, according to new documents from the spy bureau.
It claimed that it turned off all surveillance systems targeting Dotcom and others but found out more than a year later that surveillance continued without its knowledge.
The details in the documents have led Dotcom to state that there is now evidence the United States' National Security Agency was carrying out surveillance on him.
Dotcom, who should have been protected from GCSB surveillance as a New Zealand resident, said the GCSB did not know because its equipment was being used by the NSA, which was "directly involved".
"New Zealanders must know how much power a foreign state holds over their private information," he told the New Zealand Herald.
The admission from the Government Communications Security Bureau was made in High Court papers.
It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.
The surveillance against Dotcom led to the revelation the GCSB didn't understand its own law and had illegally spied on 88 people as a result.
If Dotcom were spied on by the NSA through GCSB systems, that number would likely be much higher because it was also following an inaccurate rendering of New Zealand law.
The GCSB has always said it stopped actively spying on Dotcom and his co-accused on January 20, 2012, but a recent High Court judgment revealed that the actual end of surveillance was March 22, 2012.
The former Dotcom Mansion, which was raided by police and FBI on January 20 2012 in a bid to arrest Kim Dotcom
New High Court papers submitted by the Government in defence to a claim for damages over unlawful spying on Dotcom show the GCSB confirmed its active involvement ended on January 20, 2012, with the raid on Dotcom's mansion.
That was the date of the "Operation Debut" police raid on Dotcom's mansion in Coatesville, north of Auckland, which was to assist the FBI's multi-country takedown of the internet entrepreneur's Megaupload website.
The GCSB's role was to support police by monitoring the communications of Dotcom and others, passing on intelligence about where the targets would be and if they knew they were about to be arrested.
The court papers stated the spy bureau said it "detasked some selectors" on January 20, 2012, after the Friday dawn raid on the mansion by elite anti-terror police.
"Selectors" is the term used among Five Eyes countries to describe the search terms put into its global spying apparatus. Documents have previously showed Dotcom and his co-accused had email addresses, phone numbers, addresses and websites submitted to the GCSB as "selectors".
Peter Gabriel - The Veil
Considered a hero by some, and a traitor by others, SNOWDEN is the epic story of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and looks at how and why he did what he did and who he left behind.
The Veil was written and produced by Peter Gabriel and mixed by Tchad Blake.
“As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important.
Snowden’s revelations shocked the world and made it very clear why we need to have some way to look over those who look over us. With increasing terrorist attacks, security is critical, but not without any accountability or oversight.
I was very happy to learn Oliver Stone had decided to make a film about Edward Snowden and believe this is a powerful and inspiring film.
Oliver takes his music very seriously and I have always enjoyed collaborating with him and [music supervisor] Budd Carr.”
– Peter Gabriel
The GCSB also told the High Court the "majority of selectors" were removed on January 24, 2012, the Monday following the raid, and a further "small number of selectors" were removed on January 30, 2012.
"They say that all activity by GCSB staff relating to Operation Debut ceased by 30 January, 2012."
But it added: "Limited interception of some communications continued beyond the detasking date without the knowledge of GCSB staff."
The GCSB said it was unaware of continued access of Dotcom through its systems until legal action was filed over the unlawful spying.
The court case started in April 2013, after then-Cabinet Secretary Rebecca Kitteridge carried out a review into the GCSB which revealed 88 people had been unlawfully spied on.
Pipitea House, Wellington, which houses the NZSIS and GCSB
There is no explanation in the court papers of how New Zealand's surveillance technology was used without the knowledge of the GCSB, which has the responsibility of running it.
The GCSB documents do contain an admission of NSA involvement, although it was not made outright.
In response to the accusation the GCSB had accessed NSA networks, the bureau refused to answer on national security grounds and acknowledged that under High Court rules that doing so would be seen by the court as an admission it had.
The same type of admission was made to the accusation the GCSB - and possibly the NSA - had accessed emails, phone and Skype communication, internet browsing histories and used phone or computer microphones to eavesdrop.
Experts quizzed by the Herald suggested it was either access to GCSB's systems by a Five Eyes power or that the GCSB had no idea over the surveillance processes it own systems were running.
And although audits of the system would be expected to show detailed reports of access, Kitteridge's view found the process was poor. She found "there is no internal audit function at all for many of the intelligence functions", that training was patchy and some audits simply weren't done.
Dotcom said the details showed some other party was using GCSB systems and he believed it would be the NSA.
"The US government has requested my extradition. The NSA is clearly the most interested party."
He said the alternative theory that the GCSB didn't realise what its systems collected would mean the bureau had no idea what it had done around a high-profile case which was subject to high-level scrutiny.
Kim Dotcom's campaign against surveillance has seen him linked with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist and author Glenn Greenwald
"The NSA has unrestricted access to GCSB surveillance systems. In fact most of the technology the GCSB uses was supplied by the NSA."
Dotcom said his legal team expected to take further action based on the revelation.
"If the GCSB was aiding and abetting the NSA to spy directly on New Zealanders then the seriousness of the situation has changed dramatically and a truly independent inquiry and a new criminal investigation will be unavoidable."
He said it raised questions about the spy laws which changed in 2013, giving the GCSB greater powers under clearer legislation.
There was a surge in public attention over the activities of the bureau including protest marches and community meetings before the law passed in Parliament with a single vote.
But it also raises questions about the legality. Five Eyes countries have some ability to access each other's systems but do so on the basis of a "signals intelligence directive" - a set of rules which spell out the law.
At the time of the unlawful surveillance on Dotcom, the New Zealand rules - called NZSID7 - were an inaccurate reflection of the law.
It would mean Dotcom would have been spied on unlawfully - as the GCSB has admitted has been the case - because he would have been protected if NZSID7 was accurate.
A spokeswoman for the GCSB said spying on Dotcom ended on February 16, 2012.
She said the March 22, 2012, date which emerged recently was in relation to "a plaintiff who has since settled with GCSB". Dotcom's co-accused, Finn Batato, Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortmann, along with family, were originally part of the claim for damages.
Further comment would not be made because the judgment was likely to be appealed, she said. Also, she said: "We do not comment on what may or may not be operational."
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Bill English said he would not comment because the case was before the courts.
Kim Dotcom says new evidence shows the NSA used the GCSB's equipment to spy on him
"We also do not comment on operational matters relating to our security and intelligence agencies."
A similar "no comment" came from GCSB minister Chris Finlayson. The NSA has also yet to respond but pointed to public statements by its director that it respects the laws of partner countries.
Massey University's Dr Rhys Ball, a lecturer at the Centre for Defence and Security Studies, said he believed it more likely "selectors" believed to have been turned off had not actually been deactivated.
He said it seemed unlikely the NSA would have been able to carry out surveillance on GCSB systems without the GCSB knowing. "I wouldn't have thought you could do that."
Security expert Dr Paul Buchanan, who runs a consultancy called 36th Parallel Assessments, said if the remaining surveillance was "targeted" then it was carried out by the GCSB or one of the Five Eyes parties.
He questioned whether the GCSB had a side-operation providing support to NZ Security Intelligence Service inquiries into Dotcom.
Timeline - Spying on Dotcom
2011
December 14:
Police asked the GCSB for help spying on Kim Dotcom and others.
December 16: Spying operation starts.
2012
January 20: Dotcom arrested. Spying operation ends.
January 24: Most "selectors" taken out of GCSB spying apparatus.
January 30: All GCSB work on Dotcom surveillance finished.
February 17: Question raised about legality of spying on Dotcom and two others.
February 27: GCSB legal director says a legal check has confirmed it was lawful.
March 22: Actual end of surveillance using GCSB assets.
August 9: High Court hearing hears disclosure that some other government agency "that worked for the government" was involved in Dotcom case.
August 16: Bill English as acting Prime Minister signs a Ministerial Certificate burying existence of the spying.
September 13: Prime Minister John Key is told the GCSB spied illegally and that the GCSB Ministerial Certificate is worthless. Later that month he makes it public, announcing inquiries and a review into the GCSB.
September 17: A GCSB member makes a sworn statement to the High Court saying surveillance ended on January 20.
2013
March: Key's appointee Rebecca Kitteridge completes a review of the GCSB. When released, it is a scathing indictment on its processes.
April: Legal action is launched by Dotcom over the unlawful spying, making a financial claim for damages. The GCSB checks its records and discovers surveillance continued until March 22 2012.
2017
July 14: A High Court judgment reveals publicly for the first time that the unlawful surveillance against Dotcom and others went until March 22.
A List Of 21 Ex-Agents Who Have Exposed The US Military Intelligence Complex & Government 'Cyber Troops' Manipulate Facebook, Twitter, Study Says July 23 2017 | From: ActivistPost / Bloomberg / Various
The Military Intelligence Complex (MIC) of the United States has become a behemoth. It is a monstrous creature which is forming the foundation of the technological control grid that is being erected and rolled out all around us.
As the NWO conspirators attempt to push the world forward with their model of technocracy (rule by technology), the Military Intelligence Complex is central to the execution their plans.
Right now, the MIC is the basis of data gathering (spying, interception and surveillance), data storage, data processing and data analysis.
As technology advances and we are pushed further along the path of trans-humanism, the NWO agenda would dictate that the Military Intelligence Complex take on further roles and functions, such as being the operations center of fleets of robots which will administrate over society and completely enforce law and order.
Many people are sleepwalking through these times as the groundwork is being laid for this technological control grid. Fortunately, there are others who have awoken to the agenda, some of whom are insiders (or former insiders) with a solid moral compass and the guts to do what’s right.
What follows is a selection of 20 of these brave individuals, but first, here is a brief introduction to the 17 agencies that comprise the US Military Intelligence Complex.
The 17 Agencies of the Military Intelligence Complex
The site of the Military Intelligence Complex: CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA
We are publicly told there are 17 agencies that make up the Military Intelligence Complex; however, there are probably ones that exist but whose existence is kept hidden, since they are involved with “deep black” operations which are unacknowledged.
According to ex-CIA agent Kevin Shipp (see below), this Deep State or Parallel Government behind the scenes employs 1271 organizations, 1931 private companies, 4.8 million people and has 10,000 intelligence gathering locations across the US. It operates outside the law. Not even Congress knows the size of it!
Here are the 17 Agencies We Know About:
ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence):
The ODNI was created by Congress in response to 9/11 false flag to coordinate intelligence collection and sharing among all the agencies. The director is the head of the intelligence community and the principal advisor to the president.
According to Wiki Commons, the original sign from the CIA’s first building.
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency):
The most notorious agency of all, which grew out of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in 1947.
The CIA is infamous for drug running (heroin, cocaine and more), weapon running, subverting foreign governments and installing puppet dictators (regime change), the use of front and shell companies to hide criminal activities (e.g. Evergreen as a CIA front company used to disperse chemtrails), foreign and domestic assassination (e.g. CIA Operation 40), disseminating propaganda (Operation Mockingbird), “extraordinary rendition” (Orwellian term for torture), lying to justify war (Saddam’s WMDs), creating and funding terrorists for use to further the NWO plan (Mujahideen, Al-Qaeda [Al-CIA-da] and ISIS) and mind control (e.g. MK Ultra and its various subprojects).
NSA (National Security Agency):
The formerly secretive agency which was referred to as “No Such Agency” was thrust into the spotlight by Edward Snowden in 2013.
The NSA focuses on signals intelligence (monitoring, collecting and processing communications and other electronic information), cracking secret codes and engages in mass surveillance programs on the entire world, including Americans and US allied nations, sucking up literally trillions of “transactions” (phone calls, text messages, emails) on everyone.
DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency):
The DIA is the primary entity responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence on foreign militaries.
NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency):
Yes, it should be the NGIA, but I guess the NGA wanted to join the club of alphabet soup agencies with cool three letter names to be truly part of the MIC club.
This agency is the principal provider of geospatial intelligence – analysis and information about Earth’s natural and man-made features and geo-tagged activities. GEOINT (Geospatial Intelligence) is used for combat, humanitarian and disaster relief, border and transportation security and security planning for special events.
NRO (National Reconnaissance Office):
The NRO was a secret agency for 31 years until its existence was declassified in 1992. The office designs, builds and operates the USA’s reconnaissance satellites, providing the Pentagon with precision navigation, early warning of missile launches and near real-time imagery.
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation):
The FBI has both law enforcement and intelligence functions. On the intelligence side, it aims to protect the U.S. against terrorism, cyber-attacks and foreign intelligence operations and espionage.
It maintains the government’s terrorist watch list. Under Hoover it was involved in both the JFK and MLK assassinations, as well as subverting activist movements (Co-Intel Pro). The FBI has been repeatedly caught manufacturing terrorism by using undercover agents in sting operations.
DHS (Department of Homeland Security), Office of Intelligence and Analysis:
Also created after 9/11, the DHS is in charge of emergency preparedness (FEMA), border control and transportation security (TSA) and biodefense (against epidemics). It oversees “fusion centers”.
This is a technique where they catch someone with illegally gained information (e.g. through illegal warrantless wiretapping and surveillance operations), then set up another (false) track or trail to show the judges in court to make it look like they found and tracked a suspect legally.
Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research: this bureau collects and analyzes intelligence on global affairs and advises the secretary of state and other diplomats.
Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik
Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, MD, PhD is a critically acclaimed author of psycho-political thrillers and the co-creator of the New York Times best-selling “Tom Clancy’s Op-Center” and “Tom Clancy’s Net Force” book series. He is also one of the world’s most experienced international crisis managers and hostage negotiators. His novels are based on his twenty years experience in resolving international crises for five U.S. administrations.
Dr. Pieczenik received his B.A. from Cornell University,trained in Psychiatry at Harvard and has both an M.D. from Cornell University Medical College and a Ph.D. in International Relations from M.I.T.
He was the first psychiatrist ever to receive a PhD. focusing on international relations, and is the only psychiatrist to ever have served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. He served four presidents as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr. and was a Senior Policy Planner under president Reagan.
President Carter
Dr. Pieczenik worked directly with, and reported directly to, Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz and James Baker, as well as the respective White Houses.
Dr. Pieczenik was drafted into the Vietnam War. He was assigned in the Public Health Services with the rank of Navy Captain (0-6) to run three psychiatric wards at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., including a ward where serial killers were housed.
He was subsequently offered a promotion to Rear Admiral (0-7), which he refused on the grounds that he felt honored enough to serve his country, did not want to take a pension and wished to return to civilian life to follow his passions as a physician, entrepreneur and novelist.
Dr. Pieczenik is an expert in psychological warfare, political psychology, regime change, intelligence, counterintelligence and covert operations. During his career as a senior State Department official, Dr. Pieczenik utilized his unique abilities and expertise to develop strategies and tactics that were instrumental in resolving major conflicts in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe and the United States.
Dr. Pieczenik continues to volunteer his time and expertise as a consultant to the Department of Defense. He does not accept any remuneration for his services.
To this day he still strongly believes in the integrity of the Office of the Presidency and the Republic, both of which must be bereft of corruption, deception, betrayal, collusion and crony capitalism by any and all parties, including financial, political, medical, pharmaceutical and academic special interests. His basic belief is that no one person is indispensable to the viability of State.
Dr. Pieczenik has started several successful companies, employing his methodologies in various industries, including investment banking, publishing, television/film and medicine. He has been directly involved as an Angel Investor with starting twenty-eight companies.
Department of the Treasury, Office of Intelligence and Analysis:
The job of this office is to prevent money launderers, terrorists, drug lords, etc. from moving their money through the American financial institutions.
Department of Energy, Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence:
T
he origin of this office is the Manhattan Project, when the Atomic Energy Commission was analyzing the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program. Today it provides intelligence on foreign nuclear weapons, energy security, and nuclear energy, safety and waste.
Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance:
This is the Air Force’s intelligence branch, which uses airplanes, drones and satellites to identify hideouts, bunkers, mobile launchers and weapons caches.
This is the Army’s intelligence branch, which intercepts electronic communications and provides maps, ground imagery and information on foreign forces to assist US troops in the battlefield.
ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence):
This is the Navy’s intelligence branch, which keeps tabs on foreign scientific and technological research, analyzes the structure, tactics and readiness of foreign naval forces, and tracks merchant shipping to identify illicit activity.
Marine Corps Intelligence:
This is the Marine Corps’ intelligence branch, which creates military maps, intercepts and translates radio and electronic signals, and analyzes images collected from sensors.
Coast Guard Intelligence: the Coast Guard
iS
is actually under the DHS. It is charged with protecting more than 100,000 miles of American coastline and inland waterways. It interdicts migrants, carries out search-and-rescue and handles illegal drug seizures.
(Interesting to consider that Coast Guard Intelligence is 1 of the 17, in light of the propaganda and official narrative about the “Russian hacking” of the election.
Remember when Clinton and other lying officials claimed that all 17 MIC agencies were in agreement that Russia had hacked the US? They weren’t, but even if they were, what the hell would the Coast Guard know about Russian hackers!?)
Here now is a selection of 20 ex-agents and whistle-blowers who have had the courage to stand up to the Military Intelligence Complex.
Ex-CIA Agents and Whistle-Blowers on the Military Intelligence Complex
One of the key weapons in Washington’s arsenal is the CIA or Central Intelligence Agency. Sometimes it is called “the Company” by those on the inside. Perhaps it would be better called a cult. Victor Marchetti authored his 1974 book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, where he wrote that:
“There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult - the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence - the academic world and the communications media.
The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy. The purpose of the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually illegal means..."
Former CIA chief William Colby agreed with Marchetti’s assessment:
“[CIA agents] cliqued together, forming a sealed fraternity … they developed a rather skewed view of that world … they looked down on the life of the rest of the citizenry … an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held itself to be … beyond the restraints of the Constitution."
With that in mind, here are 11 ex-CIA agents who broke out of the cult to tell the public the truth.
1. Robert Steele:
Former Marine, CIA case officer and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, Steele’s mission has been to spread the use of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Speaking out against the Military Intelligence Complex: ex-CIA agent Robert Steele
He has written handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the DIA and US Special Operations Forces. He has stated that the preconditions for revolution exist in the US, UK and other Western countries.
“Elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialization and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on.”
2. Robert Duncan:
Former CIA engineer Dr. Robert Duncan, who was involved in the research and development of “Manchurian Candidates” (i.e. mind control victims), has been trying to explain to the public over the years that the true state of current mind control technology defies imagination.
Ex-CIA engineer Robert Duncan has done much to expose the horrific nature of the mind control technology of the Military Intelligence Complex.
It is very hard (and scary) for the average person to grasp how sophisticated the technology now is. Duncan reveals how a weapons system capable of totalitarian control has been constructed. He also reveals that many people are now in wireless mental contact with AI (Artificial Intelligence) run by supercomputers – people from all walks of life, not just poor people as was done in the past.
Duncan worked with brain-to-computer interface technologies, things like remote mind reading, CIA hive mind experimentation (multiple people sharing the same mental space), remote targeting and tracking of people via their energy signature or “brain print”, remotely cloning or copying thoughts, emotions and other states (e.g. intense pain) onto a target, the “Voice of God” (piping information into people’s minds and making them hear voices), forced or induced dreams and OIW (Offensive Information Warfare).
Like many other ex-Intelligence agents, Duncan was tricked into thinking he was doing something good for humanity while he was actually constructing a weapon of torture and control. Now he is trying to alert people to the horrific nature of this technology – before it’s too late.
3. Ray McGovern:
McGovern is an outspoken ex-CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). He has accused the CIA of being a rogue agency many times, stating that the CIA routinely cooks up “intelligence” to justify pre-planned wars (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya).
“When an administration embarks on a war justified by little or no intelligence, speaking the truth can be regarded as treachery. The country could use more of that kind of "treachery".”
- Ray McGovern
It’s not bad intelligence; it’s fixed intelligence. Furthermore, he has stated that US presidents are scared of CIA directors, and that Congress hasn’t done anything to rein in the CIA before at least 9/11, if not before the time of JFK. In this video, McGovern famously challenged the lies of Donald Rumsfeld to his face.
Rumsfeld was a former executive at Searle Pharmaceuticals (that developed the horrible chemical aspartame) and former Secretary of Defense during 9/11 (who coincidentally “lost” $2.3 trillion the day before 9/11, then oversaw the US invade Iraq and other nations post-9/11).
In this quote, ex-CIA Michael Schemer exposes how the Israeli-Saudi alliance is far more dangerous than Iran.
4. Michael Scheuer:
Ex-CIA intelligence Michael Scheuer has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy for decades. He has been one of the few to have the guts to criticize Israel and cast doubts on why the US would want to ally itself so closely with the Zionist regime (hint: it’s because the Rothschilds control Israel and also the US, thus can dictate how the US spends its money and chooses its allies).
Wikipedia states that, “Scheuer became a public figure after being outed as the anonymous author of the 2004 book Imperial Hubris, in which he criticized many of the United States’ assumptions about Islamist insurgencies and particularly Osama bin Laden.
Michael Scheuer: Israel & Saudi Arabia Are Much More Dangerous Enemies To The US Than The Iran
In his book Scheuer depicted bin Laden as a rational actor who was fighting to weaken the United States by weakening its economy, rather than merely combating and killing Americans.” Now that doesn’t fit too well with the official narrative on terrorism and Islam, does it?
5. Susan Lindauer:
Ex-CIA agent Susan Lindauer endured 5 years of unjust imprisonment with no trial under the Patriot Act for the crime of speaking the truth. After 10 years, she broke her silence on 9/11, revealing how George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had decided to go to war with Iraq before 9/11 occurred.
“The Patriot Act was used against me in total contradiction to its stated purpose. Or perhaps it was the most logical use of the law, since it establishes a legal framework to crush free thinking and interrupt individual questioning of the government. It is the beginning of all dictatorship in America."
-
Susan Lindauer, March 9, 2009
She also exposed how her CIA handler Richard Fuse made her deliver threatening messages to the Iraqis – even though they possessed no WMDs and had no knowledge of the hijackings.
She confirms that the leader of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was a CIA asset. She was imprisoned for 2 years for her trouble.
6. John Kiriakou:
Kiriakou was one of the most punished whistleblowers in recent times. After being at the CIA for years, he resigned in 2004, then 3 years later in December 2007 he decided to go on television and publicly call out the CIA for its “immoral, unethical and illegal torture programs” (which you can read more about here).
Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakouu
He rightly accused the CIA of lying when the agency falsely claimed that it gained “actionable intelligence” through the torture, which violated many laws and the 8th Amendment in the Bill of Rights (which forbids cruel and unusual punishments). Like Lindauer, Kiriakou was imprisoned for almost 2 years for his trouble.
7. Kevin Shipp:
Ex-CIA agent Kevin Shipp worked as a counter-terrorism agent. He has exposed the corruption of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Susan Rice, John Brennan, Huma Abedin and many more.
Ex-CIA agent Kevin Shipp exposes how the Military Intelligence Complex destroys whistleblowers
He has talked on various issues of truth, such as the the 9/11 false flag event, the vaccine-autism connection, how mass migration is being deliberately used to destabilize the West, and how the Military Intelligence Complex has perfected the art of intimidating and destroying whistleblowers.
The Military Intelligence Complex (MIC),in many ways, is the biggest threat to a free society. Since the Military Intelligence Complex has access to anyone’s personal and private information at will, the potential for bribing, blackmailing, manipulating or otherwise controlling individuals – from the parking inspector to the president – remains intact.
The list of former agents and whistleblowers below, all of whom have exposed the Military Intelligence Complex in some way, includes not only ex-CIA officers, but also ex-NSA, ex-FBI and ex-DIA whistleblowers, as well as whistleblowers from other nations outside the USA.
Ubiquitous surveillance cameras: part of the undeniably growing presence of the Military Intelligence Complex in our lives
8. Philip Giraldi:
Giraldi is an ex-CIA officer and former director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501c4 nonprofit, non-partisan organization in the US that works for “Middle East policies that serve the American national interest.”
Ex-CIA Philip Giraldi has consistently exposed the Military Intelligence Complex, Deep State and Israel
Giraldi has been outspoken in his criticism of the Deep State, the American war machine and the untoward Israeli influence over US officials. He has exposed the propaganda of the White Helmets in Syria and the War on Terror.
“I would characterize international terrorism as a faux threat at a national level, though one that has been exaggerated through the media and fearmongering to such an extent that it appears much more dangerous than it actually is.”
He has said that the idea that Syrian President Assad attacked his own people (with chemical weapons earlier this year in 2017) was a sham. He has also asked the key question of why the US is targeting Iran when it should be targeting Saudi Arabia.
9. Philip Agee:
The late Philip Agee, who died in 2008, was an ex-CIA case officer with a conscience who blew the whistle on the CIA’s dastardly and nefarious activities.
He worked in the CIA during the 1950s and finally left in 1968. He became a whistleblower and author of several books exposing the agency. When the US revoked his passport in 1979, he first lived in Grenada in 1980 until Bishop was overthrown by the US, then in Nicaragua until 1990 when the Sandanistas were overthrown by the US, then Germany and Cuba.
He knows firsthand the CIA’s subversive activities and terrorism of Central and South America. Former CIA Director and later President Bush (senior) called Agee a traitor.
10. John Stockwell:
Stockwell worked with the CIA during their covert operations in Angola, Congo and Vietnam. After he left the agency, he exposed how the main activities of the CIA – drug running, assassinating foreign and domestic presidents, installing foreign puppet regimes and destroying the environment – are all interrelated.
"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."
-
John Stockwell
He boldly stated that the CIA was counterproductive to national security. In 1978 he appeared on 60 Minutes to expose that then CIA Director William Colby and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had systematically lied to Congress about the CIA’s operations.
11. Chip Tatum:
Ex-CIA agent Chip Tatum worked in Black Operations, in the drug smuggling trade between the US and Central American countries. He personally flew a plane with cargo which, he later discovered, turned out to be cocaine.
Ex-CIA agent Gene “Chip” Tatum
Tatum was threatened not to speak out but exposed the lurid details of the Mena, Arkansas cocaine smuggling ring, which involved Bill Clinton up to his neck. Additionally, Tatum claims Bush senior had Barry Seal and Manuel Noriega assassinated, and also gave Tatum the order to kill presidential candidate Ross Perot (which he refused to do).
We Want It All – the NSA, a lynchpin of the Military Intelligence Complex surveillance grid.
Ex-NSA Agents and Whistleblowers of the Military Intelligence Complex
In many ways, the NSA became the focal point of people’s anger and rage at being constantly surveilled, especially after Edward Snowden leaked so many authentic NSA documents to the public, via journalists like Glenn Greenwald.
The US now resembles a dictatorship with a one-way information street, where the State captures information about its citizens whilst preventing its citizens from knowing about it. This is exactly in line with what arch-NWO insider (now deceased) Zbigniew Brzezinski talked about in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
Below are 5 whistleblowers from the NSA, 4 of whom went public before Snowden.
12. Edward Snowden:
Snowden burst onto the public scene in June 2013 with a story that captured the imagination of billions of people around the world.
At only a young 29 years of age, but with a large amount of calmness, confidence and moral integrity, Snowden quit his comfortable life in Hawaii (including leaving his girlfriend and a cushy $100,000+ annual income) and fled to Hong Kong with laptops and thumb drives full of classified genuine NSA documents.
It is said that in fact Snowden was the front man for a far bigger effort than his own on behalf of 'white hats' within the intelligence community who wanted to expose the truth. It is also said that there is far, far more waiting to be released when the timing is right
There he met with journalists Greenwald, Laura Poitras and The Guardians’ Ewen MacAskill to hand over his total cache.
Ex-CIA employee and ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, arguably the most famous whistleblower in the history of the world. His leaks of NSA documents brought the crimes of the Military Intelligence Complex to general public awareness like nothing else before or since.
To protect his life, Snowden gave all the files to several other sources. He instructed them to release all the information in the event of his death.
Thanks to Snowden, numerous NSA programs which were only known to avid conspiracy researchers then became public knowledge, since the evidence of warrantless wiretapping was there in black and white for anyone to see.
Snowden is especially well know for exposing details on both Upstream Collection programs (Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar and Stormbrew), Downstream Collection programs (PRISM) and other projects or programs such as XKeyscore, Echelon, Carnivore, Dishfire, Stoneghost, Tempora, Frenchelon, Fairview, Mystic, DCSN, Boundless Informant, Bullrun, Pinwale, Stingray and SORM.
The first Snowden document published by the Guardian was a secret court (a FISA court) order authorizing the NSA to collect the telephone records of millions of US Verizon customers.
The point is that the NSA and MIC forced companies (big or small) to roll over. They then forbade these companies from telling you they rolled over. A surprising number of people can access and analyze an obscene amount of data on you.
The NSA skirted the law about not spying on Americans through its partnership with Britain’s GCHQ, because American data can get routed through GCHQ and then become “foreign” data.
Snowden achieved his aim of bringing the topic of masssurveillance into the public spotlight, in the hopes of provoking discussion and debate. However, despite this success, the NSA remains entrenched in the Deep State and continues its nefarious activities largely undisturbed.
13. William Binney:
William Binney worked at the NSA over 30 years, including time as a director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group.
Ex-NSA agent William Binney reveals the true purpose and intent of the Military Intelligence Complex
“The ultimate goal of the CIA is total population control."
- William Binney
He estimated in 2012 that the NSA had amassed over 20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) “transactions” from Americans (in gross violation of the Constitution), where a transaction means a piece of information or communication, such as emails, text messages and scripts of phone calls.
This would include every single email sent and received by US residents since 9/11. Binney has been outspoken in his criticism for the NSA, stating how current NSA surveillance far surpasses the capability of the former Soviet KGB and the Nazi Stasi agencies.
Binney has exposed how we have gone way down the slippery slope towards totalitarianism, while the NSA, the Military Intelligence Complex and the National Security State hide behind the ever-present pretext of “national security”.
Binney has also pointed out, on many occasions, the futility of the MIC and NSA collecting so much information. With so much data, the job of trying to find the important stuff becomes extremely difficult or impossible, since 99.99% of what the NSA collects and analyzes is irrelevant (note: irrelevant to the job of counter-terrorism, but not irrelevant to the job of spying on everyone).
To paraphrase Binney: the NSA is suffering from analysis paralysis and data is not intelligence.
14. Thomas Drake:
Whistleblower Thomas Drake was not only a senior executive at the NSA, but is also a decorated US Air Force and Navy veteran.
Ex-NSA agent Thomas Drake
Drake exposed another of the NSA’s numerous programs, this one called Project Trailblazer. He was charged under the Espionage Act, but in June 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped.
According to Wikipedia, “Drake rejected several deals because he refused to plea bargain with the truth”. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.
15. Kirk Wiebe:
Ex-NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe was a senior analyst at the NSA from 1975 to 2001. After the 9/11 false flag op, he stumbled upon secret NSA programs to monitor all Americans. He worked alongside William Binney in exposing these projects.
Ex-NSA agent Kirk Wiebe
In September 2002, Wiebe, along with Binney, Drake and another NSA agent Ed Loomis, filed a DoD Inspector General report regarding problems at NSA, including Trailblazer.
The report was jointly filed with Diane Roark, a staffer for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee of the US Congress who was considered a staff expert on the NSA’s budget. The report went nowhere. As with Binney, Wiebe’s house was raided in 2007 by the FBI for his whistleblowing efforts.
16. Russell Tice:
Ex-NSA agent Russell Tice came forward in 2004 to expose the NSA’s spying invasions.
Ex-NSA agent Russell Tice
He has revealed shocking details of NSA spying, mentioning some of the specific targets of past NSA wiretapping operations, which included senior Congressional leaders (e.g. Dianne Feinstein), the former White House Press Secretary and high-ranking military generals (e.g. David Petraeus, who was forced to resign as CIA chief because he was caught [by the NSA presumably] having an affair).
Tice also revealed that the entire Supreme Court, and even then-Senator from Illinois and future President, Barack Obama, was being tapped.
Ex-FBI Agents and Whistleblowers of the Military Intelligence Complex
17. Ted Gunderson:
Gunderson is a man who will need little introduction to many investigators in the field of conspiracy research, or to those who have looked into pedophilia, mind control, child trafficking and Satanism.
Ex-FBI Ted Gunderson – a man who exposed the depths of the conspiracy, including child trafficking, child sex slavery, mind control and Satanism
He was a 27-year veteran FBI special agent who worked in the Los Angeles district with over 700 agents under his command. He has worked and done interviews/presentations with various mind control survivors (e.g. Brice Taylor, Paul Bonacci).
Towards the end of his career, he stumbled upon the network of occult Secret Societies that rule the world.
Through his investigations, he came to understand that we were dealing with a sick Satanic cult that uses mind control over its victims, conducts an international pedophile ring where children were abducted through underground tunnels, and performs dark rituals with human sacrifice and child sex slaves.
At these rituals, Satanists get a dark “high” from drinking the blood of their tortured victims, which contains emotional neurochemicals released into the blood at the time of their death. With upwards of 100,000 American children missing every year, Gunderson claimed he knew firsthand that the FBI was fully complicit in the coverup of all this.
18. Sibel Edmonds:
ex-FBI agent Sibel Edmonds become a famous whistleblower when she discovered corruption at the FBI and reported it to her supervisors. They retaliated by firing her.
Ex-FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
She sued for unfair dismissal in July 2002, but as happens so much in this kind of arena, the case was dismissed in July 2004 by Judge Reggie Walton who cited the governmental state secrets privilege (read my article The Secret Privilege by Which the Military Intelligence Complex Retains Control to understand the history and significance of the state secrets privilege, which is routinely used by Government to cover up its crimes).
In August 2004 Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), an organization to help national security whistleblowers. In September 2006 a documentary about Edmonds’s case called Kill the Messenger (Une Femme à Abattre) premiered in France.
The film features ex-CIA agent Philip Gerald (whistleblower #8 above) who reveals that Israel was a key player in the illicit activities Edmonds discovered.
Edmonds is also the main source of information about Operation Gladio B. This was a continuation of the Operation Gladio project which the CIA had been running throughout Europe (using right-wing extremes, neo-fascists and arch-nationalists to carry out false flag attacks to frame left-wing communists).
According to Edmonds, around 1996-1997, the NATO-CIA-MI5-MI6 alliance decided to switch from using fascists to using Islamic terrorists, as the Cold War had ended.
The world was about to be formally introduced into a newer, scarier and more convenient enemy to replace communism: Radical Islamic Terrorism™.
Ex-DIA Agents and Whistleblowers of the Military Intelligence Complex
19. Patrick Lang:
Lang is an ex-DIA colonel who spoke up when Trump decided to strike Syria (while eating chocolate cake with the Chinese premier Xi Jinping).
Ex-DIA Colonel Patrick Lang
Lang compared the attack to the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident, where then Us President LBJ pretended that the North Vietnamese and fired upon US ships (when they were just firing upon empty water). The Trump Syria strike was likewise based on a pack of lies. Lang said:
“This is Gulf of Tonkin 2. How ironic. Donald Trump correctly castigated George W. Bush for launching an unprovoked, unjustified attack on Iraq in 2003. Now we have President Donald Trump doing the same damn thing … Here’s the good news.
The Russians and Syrians were informed, or at least were aware, that the attack was coming. They were able to remove a large number of their assets. The base the United States hit was something of a backwater. Donald Trump gets to pretend that he is a tough guy. He is not. He is a fool.”
Ex-MI5 Agents and Whistleblowers of the Military Intelligence Complex
20. Annie Machon:
For the last one on the list, we turn to the UK, the staunchest US ally in the world and the erstwhile World Empire from which the US learnt its tricks.
Ex-MI5 agent Annie Machon
The UK, like the US, has a sprawling Military Intelligence Complex, composed of various agencies such as the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, the UK version of the NSA, which conducts mass surveillance), MI5 (Military Intelligence 5, responsible for domestic counterintelligence and security) and MI6 (Military Intelligence 5, responsible for domestic counterintelligence and security).
Machon resigned in 1996 to blow the whistle on all the incompetence and crimes she witnessed. She has spoken on topics such as 9/11, 7/7, false flag ops, Secret Societies and the Bilderberg Group.
In earlier interviews and films, she appeared alongside another ex-MI5 agent, David Shayler, her former partner.
Final Thoughts
Studying the testimonies, accounts and insider information of these ex-Intelligence agents allows us to glean a lot of knowledge about how the Military Intelligence Complex really operates.
This list of course only represents a fraction of the total number of brave ex-intelligence whistleblowers out there. who have made an impression upon you.
Government 'Cyber Troops' Manipulate Facebook, Twitter, Study Says
An Oxford study found authoritarian and democratic governments game social media to shape public opinion.
Governments around the world are enlisting "cyber troops" who manipulate Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets to steer public opinion, spread misinformation and undermine critics, according to a new report from the University of Oxford.
Adding to growing evidence of government-sponsored efforts to use online tools to influence politics, researchers found 29 countries using social media to shape opinion domestically or with foreign audiences. The tactics are deployed by authoritarian regimes, but also democratically-elected governments, the authors said.
"Social media makes propaganda campaigns much stronger and potentially more effective than in the past," said Samantha Bradshaw, the report's lead author and a researcher at Oxford's Computational Propaganda Research Project.
"I don't think people realize how much governments are using these tools to reach them. It's a lot more hidden."
Online behavior of the government-backed groups varies widely, from commenting on Facebook and Twitter posts, to targeting people individually.
Journalists are harassed by government groups in Mexico and Russia, while cyber troops in Saudi Arabia flood negative Twitter posts about the regime with unrelated content and hashtags to make it harder for people to find the offending post. In the Czech Republic, the government is more likely to post a fact-check response to something they see as inaccurate, said the report.
Governments also use fake accounts to mask where the material is coming from. In Serbia, fake accounts are used to promote the government's agenda, and bloggers in Vietnam spread favorable information.
Meanwhile, government actors in Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and elsewhere use automation software - known as "bots" - to spread social media posts in ways that mimics human users.
"Cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon," said the report published by the group that is studying how digital tools are being used to manipulate public opinion.
Propaganda has long been a dark art used by governments, but digital tools are making the techniques more sophisticated, according to Bradshaw.
She said governments over the past several years have taken note of the way activists have used social media to spread a message and build support, and are adopting some of the same methods. Online tools such as data-analytics software allow governments to more effectively tailor a message for specific groups of people, maximizing its impact.
Click on the image above to view a larger version in a new window
Bradshaw said that while Russia and authoritarian regimes get most of the attention for manipulating social media, Western democracies have been using similar techniques. In the U.K., the British Army created the 77th Brigade in 2015, in part for psychological operations using social media. Bradshaw said democratic governments aren't forthcoming about their digital propaganda efforts.
“They are using the same tools and techniques as the authoritarian regimes," she said. "Maybe the motivations are different, but it's hard to tell without the transparency."
Co-operative Bank logo - The serpent eating it’s own tail? “Change for good” – or working for Satan just like the foreign bank cartel?
The Ouroboros or Uroborus is an ancient symbol depicting the Jörmungandr. A serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The name originates from within Greek language; (oura) meaning "tail" and (boros) meaning "eating", thus "he who eats the tail"
Following the U.S. election, Facebook and Twitter have been criticized for not doing enough to filter out fake news and offensive content.
Facebook, which had no immediate comment on the report, has hired more human curators and partnered with fact-check organizations in an attempt to keep misinformation out of people's feeds.
Twitter spokesman Ian Plunkett referred to a June a blog post that said the company "should not be the arbiter of truth," and that others on the site do a better job of highlighting wrongdoing. The company has taken steps to crack down on the use of bots.
Bradshaw said there isn't an easy solution when balancing the benefits of sharing information across the Internet against the problems with spreading propaganda. She said one improvement would be tools that make it more clear when a government is involved.
“There's a fine line," she says, "between free speech and censorship. "
10 Surprising Ways the Government is Spying on You
Your Body Is No Longer Yours: Australia Has Become The First Country To Microchip Its Citizens & Australia: A Tracking Device In Every Car July 19 2017 | From: WakingTimes / Uncensored
You may not have noticed, but there are two kinds of countries in the world these days: Dictatorships led by authoritarians and democracies that are slowly being taken over by authoritarians. Put Australia into the latter.
Organic & Healthyreports that the land Down Under has become the first nation to begin microchipping its citizens, though NBC Newspredicted some years ago that, by 2017, Americans would all be microchipped.
Australia’s drive to implant citizens with what many believe is the Biblical “mark of the beast” is “a clever propaganda campaign that equates RFID microchipping with becoming superhuman, and people are begging for it,” News.com.aunoted.
It’s All About ‘Convenience’
One Australian woman, Shanti Korporaal, from Sydney, is at the center of a controversy after having implants inserted in both hands. “You could set up your life so you never have to worry about any passwords or PINs,” she told News.com.au.
The idea is that microchip implants give you a unique identifier, so your implant can be used to get into locked doors, transfer personal information to smart phones and other personal devices – and, of course, allow you to be tracked everywhere you go by government.
Why would anyone voluntarily want to do that? One word, says one microchipping recipient: “Convenience.”
As bad as it is to carry cards around that transfer personal and financial data to massive (hackable) databases and smartphones that serve as personal tracking devices – again, out of convenience – you at least have the option (for now) of leaving them behind when you go somewhere.
You don’t have to take a smartphone with you, or at minimum you can learn some ways to better protect your information. With cards, if you must carry them, there are devices you can use to essentially shield them from ID thieves and tracking devices.
But once you put a tracking device under your skin, the only way to get rid of it is to have it surgically removed, or hack off your limb. Would authorities actually track you for no reason? It’s already being done.
As we reported in April 2012 that police departments were tracking cell phones without first getting a warrant, as required by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union found that “many” of nearly 200 departments surveyed did so sans warrant.
While some departments were getting the required warrant first, others “said they use varying legal standards, such as a warrant or a less-strict subpoena.”
Why Make it Easier to Track You?
The practice has continued. In July the Boston Globereported that the city’s police department had used “a controversial cellphone technology 11 times over the past seven years without once obtaining a search warrant…”
Another major problem is hacking and identity theft. In the NBC News report of several years ago, reporters noted that one of the “problems” that could be solved had to do with medical information:
Chips would allow doctors and hospitals to have access to your identity and medical record if you were unconscious and unaccompanied upon admission (and how often does that happen?).
But medical information is a top target of hackers and identity thieves. In fact, health care information is the most coveted by cyber thieves because data contained in health records – prescriptions, Social Security numbers, addresses, etc. – are much more permanent than, say, financial data (which is changed once a hack has been detected).
Privacy in a digital world comes at a premium as it is. Our retinas are scanned, our wallets are scanned, our online data is hacked and our movements are already being tracked – both by government and by private corporations.
But all of those methods can be mitigated. It’s very difficult to mitigate personal tracking when you’re carrying the tracker inside your body.
The point is, if government can track you 24/7/365, government can control you as well.
Australia: A Tracking Device In Every Car
I hate to say this Australia, but you guys seem to be embracing the 2030 Agenda NWO with sickening enthusiasm! Microchipping, compulsory vaccination, and this:
Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill has told Justin and Kate tracking devices will be fitted to about 1000 cars under a 12-month trial beginning in September. They will then evaluate the best technological option before a statewide roll-out. Tracking itself is not new technology – in fact phones allow Uber users to track their cars.”
Police say they want every vehicle in the state to be fitted with a tracking device to stamp out motor vehicle theft.
While the numbers are coming down, Victoria has the highest number of car thefts in the nation.
Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill has told Justin and Kate tracking devices will be fitted to about 1000 cars under a 12-month trial beginning in September. They will then evaluate the best technological option before a statewide roll-out.
Seven Reasons Why The Internet Of Things Should Scare You & The Internet Of Things Poses Human Health Risks: Scientists Question The Safety Of Untested 5G Technology At International Conference July 15 2017 | From: MakeUseOf / EnvironmentalHealthTrust / Various
It was only a couple of years ago that we – the public- started to understand the term Internet of Things (IoT). Until then, we’d never entertained the idea that our bathroom tap might want to have a chat with the dishwasher.
Our naiveté in these matters promised us many great things. It’s also promising many great dangers.
The IoT is full of inflated promises of increased efficiency, lives made easier, and people and industries made perfect. It’s reminiscent of Snowball falsely promising the others in Animal Farm that their new technology - The Windmill - would bring them a life of peace and leisure. A life in which “sordid labor” would be lifted from their backs.
The same promises were made when email and smartphones were invented.
Click on the image above to view a larger version in a new window
These progresses were hailed as a miraculous salve, ready to be employed by all for an easier and better life. The same is now happening with the IoT. The potential benefits grow bright, while the dangers are cast into the quiet shadows.
It’s time to draw attention to these dangers. Here are seven terrifying promises of the Internet of Things:
1. An Unbearable World of Advertisements
If you think ads being thrust upon you every time you use something digital is frustrating, you’ve seen nothing yet.
It won’t be long until your trousers are horrified by your weight gain. In turn, they’ll conspire against you. They’ll have the TV showing contextual ads about new fad diets. The touch-screen on the fridge will be selling you low-fat yogurt.
Your watch will be telling you to pay for a new fitness app. Google could even have your NEST thermostat, with its many uses, telling you the weight-loss benefits of having the heat turned up.
It used to be the case that our private dwellings were our quiet escape from the bombardments of the high street. But marketers encroached on that privacy through TV ads, cold calling, and more recently, our connected devices.
With the future promising the connectedness of everything including the kitchen sink, the only means of escaping so many advertisements will be atop a snow-covered mountain.
2. A Conspiracy of Perfection With the IoT comes a burgeoning of “tracking devices“. Small devices that track everything from the steps you take, to a minute-by-minute analysis of your cortisol levels. By tracking certain aspects of our lives, we are told, we can “optimize” and “make better life choices”.
In other words, if we have enough data, we will know exactly what to do to become the perfect version of ourselves. If we’re overweight, unwell, tired, or stressed, the fault is ours for not paying attention to “The Data”.
Society will cast asunder us fat, unhappy ones simply for choosing human error over a life dictated by algorithms and apps. The corporations will no-doubt punish us, too. More expensive health insurance because the sensors in the fridge saw how many pork pies we’ve eaten, is just the beginning.
This pressure for continual self-improvement and optimization drags us further from the present than current technology forces us to go. This will necessarily drive an even greater wedge between those who are connected, and those who aren’t.
3. A Waste of Money
It used to be that when we bought a washing machine, it was a rare expense. The next one would be purchased in 15 years or so. Something might go wrong in the meantime, but the guy down the road would fix it.
Today, washing machines have a much shorter lifespan. We have to be prepared to shell out for a new one around every five years (thanks to planned obsolescence). A new smartphone, smartwatch, and tablet every three or four years. A new laptop every four to five years. These lifespans are short. The only consolation is that there’s not too many things to replace.
Your mattress may not need replacing every couple of years, but the sensor inside of it may do. The same goes for your kitchen table, and the sofa. For cheaper connected devices like the kettle, toaster, your belt, light switches and door knobs; expect replacement of these components to become a new, regular expense.
When your house is awash with 30, 50, 100 connected devices, that’s a lot of electronic gadgetry to keep working 365 days per year. That’s a lot of replacing broken sensors. That’s a lot of money.
As the IoT explodes, it’s physically impossible for the security industry to keep up. Simply password protecting each of our devices isn’t working. People are leaving default passwords set, leaving their devices massively vulnerable to attack. But who can blame them? Who would want to manually change the password for 75 devices around home and work?
The reason there’s such a buzz about the IoT is quite simple. Once everything we do, say, think, and eat, is tracked, the big data that’s available about each of us is immensely valuable. When companies know our lives inside and out, they can use that data to make us buy even more stuff. Once they control your data, they control you.
When that data is anonymous, it helps companies sell to broad market segments. More preferable, and more valuable, is when that data is relatable to an individual (i.e. you and me).
When a supermarket knows the food that you buy, they can offer you completely personalized deals. When Amazon tracks the products you look at, they can recommend other products based on your individual taste.
It’s good business, sure. But it also means that any information tracked about us, can be linked back to us. The calls you make, messages you send, food you eat, clothes you buy, photos you take. The sites you browse, time you spend sat down, number of beers you drink, steps you take, and conversations you have.
This information is all open for the picking. Once your connected devices are neatly synced up, the picture of you available to corporations and governments will be more detailed than you could ever imagine. Privacy is dead.
6. Complete Digital Exhaustion
Look around. There’s little denying that we’re already over-connected. Kids around the world are suffering from. Family time is being ruined by smartphone notifications. What more do we expect from technology?
Is there any real benefit to be had from an oven that turns itself on when it knows you’re on your way home? From receiving a ping when you’re at work telling you the house is too cold? From your smartwatch telling you your plants need watering when you’re on a run?
All this is setting us up for is complete digital burn-out. The anti-tech movement of neo-luddism is fast expanding for a reason. People are tired of relying so much on technology. They’re craving a simpler way of life. Not the inflated promise of one, which is what we’re facing with IoT, but something actually simpler.
7. Impossible Choices
One of the most pressing technological choices we make today concerns the ecosystems we opt for. When we buy a laptop, do we choose Windows, or Apple? When we buy a smartphone, do we choose Android or iOS?
Once we’ve made a decision, it’s hard to go back. Moving all of your photos, music and videos from one ecosystem to another is a nightmare, and isn’t something you want to be repeating time and again.
When it comes to the IoT, the choice is even more important. This is because the industry is new, and there are no leading ecosystems to set the “Standard” for how devices communicate. The entire industry is fragmented.
Think back to when HD-DVD was battling Blue-Ray. If you placed your bets on HD-DVD, you were out of pocket a year later. We’re in the same position now with the IoT.
If your entire building is running connected devices that rely on different ecosystems, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands. You’ll either have to live with juggling a ton of devices that can’t work together, or you’ll have to replace many of them once a single ecosystem dominates.
The IoT will undoubtedly bring benefits. But it’ll also bring many dangers. Those who are pushing for the IoT to become huge, are those who are set to profit the most from it, and we mustn’t be blindsided by this. After all, the IoT will run on Big Data. And Big Data means Big Money.
The focus of this article has largely been on the use of the IoT in the home. Seems this is the area that’s exciting so many consumers, it’s what so many people envision when they hear the term “Internet of Things”.
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So we should stop getting giddy about how smart tech can connect our furniture and utensils to the Web. Instead we should focus our efforts on how we can use this technology to make real change. On how the IoT can offer real benefits to those who need it.
After all, who needs their toilet to tell them how many times they’ve been for a wee?
What other things scare you about the Internet of Things? What should we be wary of, and what should we be looking to avoid?
The Internet Of Things Poses Human Health Risks: Scientists Question The Safety Of Untested 5G Technology At International Conference
Replicated research shows that Millimeter waves – used by the Department of Defense in crowd control weapons – interacts with human skin and eyes.
Israeli research studies presented at an international conference reveal that the same electromagnetic frequencies used for crowd control weapons form the foundation of the latest network – branded as 5G – that will tie together more than 50 billion devices as part of the Internet of Things.
Current investigations of wireless frequencies in the millimeter and submillimeter range confirm that these waves interact directly with human skin, specifically the sweat glands.
Dr. Ben-Ishai of the Department of Physics, Hebrew University, Israel recently detailed how human sweat ducts act like an array of helical antennas when exposed to these wavelengths.
Scientists cautioned that before rolling out 5G technologies that use these frequencies, research on human health effects needed to be done first to ensure the public and environment are protected.
“If you are one of the millions who seek faster downloads of movies, games and virtual pornography, a solution is at hand, that is, if you do not mind volunteering your living body in a giant uncontrolled experiment on the human population.
At this moment, residents of the Washington, DC region – like those of 100 Chinese cities – are about to be living within a vast experimental Millimeter wave network to which they have not consented – all courtesy of American taxpayers,” stated Dr. Devra Davis, President of the Environmental Health Trust.
Davis proposed that the Trump Administration could provide funds for research and training by implementing a 2 cents per month fee on all wireless devices, their manufacturers and network providers.
“Training and research in bioelectromagnetics including the evaluation of new technologies is essential before universal deployment”.
“This work shows that the same parts of the human skin that allow us to sweat also respond to 5G radiation much like an antenna that can receive signals. We need the potential adverse health impacts of 5G to be seriously evaluated before we blanket our children, ourselves and the environment with this radiation.”
Potential Risks to Human Health from Future Sub-MM Communication Systems: Paul Ben-Ishai, PhD
This is from the 2017 Expert Forum on Wireless and Health. All presentations from this conference are availible here.
Research studies from the Dielectric Spectroscopy Laboratory of the Department of Applied Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, headed by Dr. Yuri Feldman, indicate that millimeter and submillimeter waves may lead to preferential layer absorption. The number of sweat ducts within human skin varies from two million to four million.
The researchers pointed to replicated peer research of these biological effects in laboratory research conducted in other countries and considered this mechanism of action well proven.
Today’s cellular and Wi-Fi networks rely on microwaves – a type of electromagnetic radiation utilizing frequencies up to 6 gigahertz (GHz) in order to wirelessly transmit voice or data.
However, 5 G applications will require unlocking of new spectrum bands in higher frequency ranges above 6 GHz to 100 GHz and beyond, utilizing submillimeter and millimeter waves – to allow ultra-high rates of data to be transmitted in the same amount of time as compared with previous deployments of microwave radiation.
“Most people are unaware that these waves are cycling several billion times per second. 75 GHz is in fact 75,000,000,000 cycles per second,“ stated Davis about these frequencies rapidly penetrating the skin.
Click on the image above to download the Active Denial Technology PDF
For years, the U.S., Russian and Chinese defense agencies have been developing weapons that rely on the capability of this electromagnetic technology to induce unpleasant burning sensations on the skin as a form of crowd control.
Millimeter waves are utilized by the U.S. Army in crowd dispersal guns called Active Denial Systems.
Dr. Paul Ben-Ishai pointed to research that was commissioned by the U.S. Army to find out why people ran away when the beam touched them.
"If you are unlucky enough to be standing there when it hits you, you will feel like your body is on fire.”
The U.S. Department of Defense explains how:
“The sensation dissipates when the target moves out of the beam. The sensation is intense enough to cause a nearly instantaneous reflex action of the target to flee the beam.”
The conference at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University (IIAS) was organized in cooperation with the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Environmental Health Trust (EHT).
Verizon just announced that 5G networks will be tested in 11 U.S. cities. 5G Networks will involve the deployment of millions of antennas nationwide, thousands in each city, because millimeter waves cannot easily travel through buildings or other obstacles.
Proposed installations have lead to public outcry in residential areas where homeowners do not want antennas mounted at their yards or near schools.
Several researchers at the conference raised concerns that current regulations are not adequate to protect public health.
“There is an urgent need to evaluate 5G health effects now before millions are exposed…. We need to know if 5G increases the risk of skin diseases such as melanoma or other skin cancers,” stated Ron Melnick, the National Institutes of Health scientist, now retired, who led the design of the National Toxicology Program study on cell phone radiofrequency radiation.
Dariusz Leszczynski, PhD, Chief Editor of Radiation and Health, stated that the international organization – called ICNIRP – developing recommendations for public exposure limits of these higher frequencies was planning to classify all the skin in the human body as belonging to the limbs rather than to the head or torso.
Leszczynski cautioned that:
“If you classify skin as limbs – no matter where the skin is – you are permitted to expose it more than otherwise.”
“The use of sub-terahertz (Millimeter wave) communications technology (cell phones, Wi-Fi, network transmission antennas) could cause humans to feel physical pain via nociceptors,“ stated Dr. Yael Stein, MD, who wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission about 5G Spectrum Frontiers.
The United States Government Is Being Sued For Information On The Secretive Five Eyes Intelligence Group July 12 2017 | From: Wired
The Five Eyes surveillance cabal, established at the end of World War 2, includes the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The agreement covers how intelligence is shared. And that's about all we know about it.
The US government is being sued for information about the deal, officially known as the United Kingdom-United States Communications Intelligence Agreement.
UK-based charity Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration, which all hold information about the intelligence sharing partnership.
The lawsuit follows requests for details about the partnership under the US Freedom of Information Act. All the government agencies rejected the requests.
The Five Eyes group has existed since 1946 and the last document officially published about it comes from 1955. Since then, vast technological changes have altered how national security bodies collect and store information.
“We hope to find out the current scope and nature of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement – and how much has changed since the 1955 version," Privacy International legal officer Scarlet Kim tells WIRED.
"We’d also like to know the US rules and regulations governing this exchange of information – what safeguards and oversight, if any, exist with respect to these activities?"
The complaint, says Privacy International wants to access the current text of the agreement, how the US government implements it, and the procedures for how intelligence is shared. "These records are of paramount concern because the public lacks even basic information about the Five Eyes alliance," the document says.
The campaign group argues that because the public doesn't have enough information about Five Eyes, it is impossible to know if there is a "legal basis" for exchanging signals intelligence.
“We are eager to know whether the US shares information not only about Americans but also about Five Eyes citizens and residents with its Five Eyes partners - and whether it undertakes any sort of due diligence before it shares this information," Kim says.
The lawsuit will take a long time to progress through the US legal system but if it is successful could reveal previously private information.
Seven years ago, the 1946 agreement between the UK and US, which was superseded by the 1955 document, was acknowledged and released for the first time in the UK. Documents published by the National Archives revealed the basis for the co-operation between the countries.
The last light shed on the Five Eyes network came after 2013, when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden published thousands of documents from inside the intelligence agency.
“The Snowden disclosures gave us a glimpse into how the change in technical capabilities has transformed the work the 5 Eyes countries do together," Kim explains.
"For example, we know that the NSA and GCHQ have worked together to obtain the contact lists and address books from hundreds of millions of personal email and IM accounts as well as webcam images from video chats of millions of Yahoo users".
Among many of the practices and capabilities revealed by Snowden surrounding the global intelligence picture, was a glimpse at what is shared with members of Five Eyes.
Google Maps Has Been Tracking Your Every Move, And There’s A Website To Prove It + EU Fines Google A Record 2.4 Billion Euros In Antitrust Case July 8 2017 | From: AntiNews / CGTN / Various
It has emerged that Google has been tracking Smartphone users everywhere they go, indicating it with a red dot on a map to mark and make their location much clearer for identification.
If you do not believe this, you remember what appeared in the scene of the Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is on the run from the law, but is unable to avoid detection because everywhere he goes, there are constant retina scans feeding his location back to a central database? That is exactly what we are talking about here.
You can even track yourself to see whether what we are talking about is true or not. Just log in with the same account you use on your Smartphone. You will be able to see records of everywhere you have been from day one of that month.
It is an established fact that no matter what privacy settings you may try to implement, your information is still being collected and stored somewhere by our governments.
But somehow, you can minimize your tracking by adhering to the following procedure below. Just follow the following steps carefully and share this information with your friends, families and anybody you know.
How To Disable Tracking & Erase Your Past History
To check whether location history is enabled on your account, go to the Google Maps Location history page and click the gear-icon button to access History settings.
You can disable or enable the service there. Disabling location history however, does not remove your past history.
If you would like to erase the locations Google Maps has stored for the past 30 days, go back to the Location history page. The default time period shows location history for the current day, so you may not see any plots on the map. Use the pull-down menu below the calendar on the left to show your history, up to 30 days.
If you choose a time period in which Google Maps has tracked your location, you will see the points where you have been on the map. Below the calendar, you will see options to delete your history from the time period you have chosen or to delete all history.
EU Fines Google A Record 2.4 Billion Euros In Antitrust Case
The European Union slapped a record 2.42 billion-euro ($2.72 billion) fine on internet giant Google on Tuesday for taking advantage of its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own online shopping business.
European regulators gave the company based in Mountain View, California, 90 days to stop or face more fines of up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide revenue of parent company Alphabet.
Google says it is considering an appeal. CGTN’s Elena Casas reports.
The European Commission, which polices EU competition rules, alleges Google elevates its shopping service even when other options might have better deals.
The Commission said Google “gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services. It stifled competition on the merits in comparison shopping markets.”
“What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told reporters.
Google maintains it’s just trying to package its search results in a way that makes it easier for consumers to find what they want.
“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both,” Kent Walker, senior vice president at Google, said in a statement.
“We will review the Commission’s decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case,” he said.
The fine is the highest ever imposed in Europe for anti-competitive behavior, exceeding a 1.06 billion euros penalty on Silicon Valley chip maker Intel in 2009.
But the penalty is likely to leave a bigger dent in Google’s pride and reputation than its finances. Alphabet has more than $92 billion (82 billion euros) in cash, including nearly $56 billion (50 billion euros) in accounts outside of Europe.
Vestager said the Commission’s probe, which started in 2008, looked at some 1.7 billion search queries. Investigators found that on average even Google Shopping’s most highly-ranked rivals only appeared on page 4 of Google search results. Vestager said that 90 percent of user-clicks are on page one.
“As a result, competitors were much less likely to be clicked on,” she said. It is up to Google to decide what changes it wants to make to comply with the Commission’s ruling, but any remedy must ensure that rival companies receive the same treatment as Google Shopping. “We will monitor Google’s compliance closely,” Vestager said.
She noted that that any company or person who has suffered damages due to the company’s practices can make claims to national courts.
More broadly, Vestager said, the probe has established that Google is dominant in general internet search in all 31 countries of the European economic area. This will affect other cases the Commission might build against the internet giant’s various businesses, like Google Images.
She also noted that regulators are making “good progress” in its other Google probes into Android and search advertising, and that the “preliminary conclusion” is that they breach EU anti-trust rules.
The Commission has come under fire in the United States for a perceived bias against U.S. companies.
Vestager said she has examined statistics concerning anti-trust, merger control and state aid decisions and that “I can find no facts to support any kind of bias.”
Top Canadian Court Permits Worldwide Internet Censorship & Five-Eyes Nations Want Communications Providers To Bust Crypto For Them July 4 2017 | From: Zerohedge / TheRegister
A country has the right to prevent the world’s Internet users from accessing information, Canada’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.
In a decision that has troubling implications for free expression online, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a company’s effort to force Google to de-list entire domains and websites from its search index, effectively making them invisible to everyone using Google’s search engine
The case, Google v. Equustek, began when British Columbia-based Equustek Solutions accused Morgan Jack and others, known as the Datalink defendants, of selling counterfeit Equustek routers online. It claimed California-based Google facilitated access to the defendants’ sites.
The defendants never appeared in court to challenge the claim, allowing default judgment against them, which meant Equustek effectively won without the court ever considering whether the claim was valid.
Although Google was not named in the lawsuit, it voluntarily took down specific URLs that directed users to the defendants’ products and ads under the local (Canadian) Google.ca domains.
But Equustek wanted more, and the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that Google had to delete the entire domain from its search results, including from all other domains such Google.com and Google.go.uk. The British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld the decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada decision followed the analysis of those courts.
EFF intervened in the case, explaining [.pdf] that such an injunction ran directly contrary to both the U.S. Constitution and statutory speech protections. Issuing an order that would cut off access to information for U.S. users would set a dangerous precedent for online speech.
In essence, it would expand the power of any court in the world to edit the entire Internet, whether or not the targeted material or site is lawful in another country. That, we warned, is likely to result in a race to the bottom, as well-resourced individuals engage in international forum-shopping to impose the one country’s restrictive laws regarding free expression on the rest of the world.
The Supreme Court of Canada ignored those concerns. It ruled that because Google was subject to the jurisdiction of Canadian courts by virtue of its operations in Canada, courts in Canada had the authority to order Google to delete search results worldwide. The court further held that there was no inconvenience to Google in removing search results, and Google had not shown the injunction would offend any rights abroad.
Perhaps even worse, the court ruled that before Google can modify the order, it has to prove that the injunction violates the laws of another nation thus shifting the burdent of proof from the plaintiff to a non-party.
An innocent third party to a lawsuit shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden or proving whether an injunction violates the laws of another country.
Although companies like Google may be able to afford such costs, many others will not, meaning many overbroad and unlawful orders may go unchallenged. Instead, once the issue has been raised at all, it should be the job of the party seeking the benefit of an order, such as Equustek, to establish that there is no such conflict. Moreover, numerous intervenors, including EFF, provided ample evidence of that conflicts in this case.
Beyond the flaws of the ruling itself, the court’s decision will likely embolden other countries to try to enforce their own speech-restricting laws on the Internet, to the detriment of all users. As others have pointed out, it’s not difficult to see repressive regimes such as China or Iran use the ruling to order Google to de-index sites they object to, creating a worldwide heckler’s veto.
The ruling largely sidesteps the question of whether such a global order would violate foreign law or intrude on Internet users’ free speech rights. Instead, the court focused on whether or not Google, as a private actor, could legally choose to take down speech and whether that would violate foreign law.
This framing results in Google being ordered to remove speech under Canadian law even if no court in the United States could issue a similar order.
The Equustek decision is part of a troubling trend around the world of courts and other governmental bodies ordering that content be removed from the entirety of the Internet, not just in that country's locale. On the same day the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision issued, a court in Europe heard arguments as to whether to expand the right-to-be-forgotten worldwide.
Five-Eyes Nations Want Communications Providers To Bust Crypto For Them
This week's five-eyes meeting has issued its communique, promising to get the tech sector to solve the problems of online terrorism and encrypted communications.
The communique explains the five countries need to “deal with the relentless threats of terrorism, violent extremism, cyber-attacks, and international instability, while retaining our deep commitment to the shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law”.
The relevant ministers of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA pledged their support for the recently-announced“Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” (Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter).
About encryption, the HTTPS-hosted communique says it can “severely undermine public safety efforts by impeding lawful access to the content of communications during investigations into serious crimes, including terrorism.”
So – wake up, dear reader, we're nearly at the end of the bureaucratese:
“We committed to develop our engagement with communications and technology companies to explore shared solutions while upholding cybersecurity and individual rights and freedoms”.
In other words, rather than passing laws to make crypto safely crackable and set the value of Pi at three, the ministers want the tech sector to do it for them. We think.
You Might Already be Microchipped - Leaked Docs Confirm Virtually Everything on the Planet isTracked
100 Trillion Microscopic Tracking Chips Linking All Resources & People in Real Time.
Google, Not GCHQ, Is The Truly Chilling Spy Network & Top 10 Disturbing Facts About Facebook June 24 2017 | From: TheGuardian / Listverse
When Edward Snowden first revealed the extent of government surveillance of our online lives, the then foreign secretary, William (now Lord) Hague, immediately trotted out the old chestnut: “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.”
This prompted replies along the lines of: “Well then, foreign secretary, can we have that photograph of you shaving while naked?”, which made us laugh, perhaps, but rather diverted us from pondering the absurdity of Hague’s remark.
Most people have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t give the state the right to see them as fair game for intrusive surveillance. By now, most internet users are aware that they are being watched, but may not yet appreciate the implications of it.
During the hoo-ha, one of the spooks with whom I discussed Snowden’s revelations waxed indignant about our coverage of the story. What bugged him (pardon the pun) was the unfairness of having state agencies pilloried, while firms such as Google and Facebook, which, in his opinion, conducted much more intensive surveillance than the NSA or GCHQ, got off scot free.
His argument was that he and his colleagues were at least subject to some degree of democratic oversight, but the companies, whose business model is essentially “surveillance capitalism”, were entirely unregulated.
He was right.“Surveillance”, as the security expert Bruce Schneier has observed, is the business model of the internet and that is true of both the public and private sectors. Given how central the network has become to our lives, that means our societies have embarked on the greatest uncontrolled experiment in history.
Without really thinking about it, we have subjected ourselves to relentless, intrusive, comprehensive surveillance of all our activities and much of our most intimate actions and thoughts. And we have no idea what the long-term implications of this will be for our societies – or for us as citizens.
One thing we do know, though: we behave differently when we know we are being watched. There is lots of evidence about this from experimental psychology and other fields, but most of that comes from small-scale studies conducted under controlled conditions.
By comparison, our current experiment is cosmic in scale: nearly 2 billion people on Facebook, for example, doing stuff every day. Or the 3.5bn searches that people type every day into Google. All this activity is leaving digital trails that are logged, stored and analysed.
We are being watched 24x7x365 by machines running algorithms that rummage through our digital trails and extract meaning (and commercial opportunities) from them.
We have solid research, for example, which shows that Facebook “likes” can be used to “automatically and accurately predict a range of personal attributes including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender”.
The idea that being watched on this scale isn’t affecting our behaviour is implausible, to put it mildly. Throughout history, surveillance has invariably had a chilling effect on freedom of thought and expression. It affects, for example, what you search for. After the Snowden revelations, traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for internet users decreased significantly.
By now, most internet users are aware that they are being watched, but may not yet appreciate the implications of it. If that is indeed the case, then a visit to an interesting new website – Social Cooling – might be instructive.
It illustrates the way social media assembles a “data mosaic” about each user that includes not just the demographic data you’d expect, but also things such as your real (as opposed to your “projected”) sexual orientation, whether you’ve been a victim of rape, had an abortion, whether your parents divorced before you were 21, whether you’re an “empty nester”, are “easily addictable” or “into gardening”, etc.
On the basis of these parameters, you are assigned a score that determines not just what ads you might see, but also whether you get a mortgage.
Once people come to understand that (for example) if they have the wrong friends on Facebook they may pay more for a bank loan, then they will start to adjust their behaviour (and maybe change their friends) just to get a better score. They will begin to conform to ensure that their data mosaic keeps them out of trouble.
They will not search for certain health-related information on Google in case it affects their insurance premiums. And so on. Surveillance chills, even when it’s not done by the state. And even if you have nothing to hide, you may have something to fear.
Top 10 Disturbing Facts About Facebook
Ever since the Edward Snowden incident, people are suspicious of major online companies such as Facebook and Google. We know they are collecting lots of data.
Only Facebook knows how much data they collect on their users, but estimates peg the number at about 500 terabytes per day. A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes. The average 720p movie is about one gigabyte. That means Facebook is collecting the equivalent of 510,000 movies every day.
The sheer scale of data mining is impressive, but what they can do with this data is more impressive, or creepy, depending where you sit on the megalomaniac scale. Facebook is a part of everyday life. Is that a good thing? Here are ten disturbing facts about Facebook to help you decide.
10. Facial Recognition
When a friend tags in a photo on Facebook, this information is added to Facebook’s giant stack of data. The social network has AI bots that sift through all this data to do pattern matching with your face.
Facebook’s algorithm is so good that they claim to have an accuracy of 98 percent. With every newly uploaded photo, they get better at pattern matching faces. The question now becomes how long we have until Facebook sells this information to retailers.
Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise is in a shop that changes what is on the mannequin based on what they know about him?
9. Facebook Knows Where You Are At All Times
If you have the Facebook Messenger app, the chances are that you didn’t tell it to stop sharing your location. It’s not a bad thing if you want Facebook to know where you are. But what about other people? What if a stalker wanted to track you down and follow you? Could they also use Facebook Messenger?
One programmer investigated and created a simple Chrome plugin called Marauder’s Map. The name refers to a map Harry Potter had in Hogwarts that allowed him to see where everyone was in the castle. Marauder’s Map was capable of giving the exact coordinates of friends who used Messenger.
By looking at a simple map, the programmer was able to identify exactly where his friends were. In response, Facebook disabled location sharing from the Messenger app. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t collecting that data.
8. Using Facebook Makes You Feel Worse
The more you use Facebook, the worse you will feel. Heavy use of social media has been shown to cause a host of different problems, including decreased face-to-face relationships, increased sedentary behavior, and erosion of self-esteem through unfavorable social comparison.
Studies carried out by Yale showed that the use of Facebook had a substantial impact on mental health. The activity of liking other’s content and clicking links predicted a self-reported decrease in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction.
When it comes to Facebook, people carefully tailor what is presented to show the highlights of their life and omit the downsides. Others who are browsing someone’s profile feel worse when they are comparing themselves to that person’s highlights.
7. Facebook Creates An Echo Chamber For Your Views
After the election of Donald Trump and the recent Brexit crisis, people were quick to turn the blame toward Facebook and Google for curating “fake news” articles. The evidence was so strong that even the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had to make a promise to filter out fake news sites and warn users not to be swayed by different websites.
The mainstream media focused on “fake news” (probably because it was competing with them) but failed to mention the other problem people faced with Facebook: what is referred to as the “filter bubble.”
Facebook’s main aim is to to get you to spend lots of time on their platform. If you read the above entry, you might now think this is bad for your health. It’s also bad for your intellect. Facebook gets you to stay around by curating what they think you will like to see.
The problem with this is that, for example, if you are a left-wing political supporter, you will never see content showing the positive aspects of right-wing politics, and the same principle holds if you’re right-wing. This filter bubble also makes it seem that the political party you support is more popular than they are, even if they’re not.
Despite the mission of bringing people together, this aspect of Facebook may be driving them apart.
6. Facebook Negatively Influences People With Eating Disorders
A small study with 84 college women at Florida State University found that those who use Facebook more often were more likely to report disordered eating. Another study from the American University in Washington, DC, found that girls who scan Facebook photos are more likely to indicate body dissatisfaction.
Once again, we come back to how Facebook makes us compare ourselves to others. If it can have an effect on people who aren’t currently suffering from any mental illness, the effect may be more pronounced on people already facing severe psychological issues like eating disorders.
5. Facebook Makes Lonely People Feel Even More Lonely
New York University clinical psychiatrist Dr. Sudeepta Varma stated that Facebook keeps people in the know about what others are doing - but it also reminds them of what they themselves aren’t doing, which can make them feel left out. That was the conclusion from the study of 82 young adults who were active Facebook users.
The most shocking thing about this study is that it happened over two short weeks. After only two weeks of use, Facebook led to a steep decline in subjective happiness.
4. Facebook Knows More About You Than You Think
Facebook’s News Feed is designed to keep you engaged as long as possible. During that time, Facebook builds an ever-evolving and complex mesh of data on their users.
They create a profile using predictive analysis, which allows them to find out how susceptible you are to advertising, which way you lean politically, and whether you are more likely to pay with cash or a credit card.
They even guess how intelligent you are, based on what content you like. If you want to get a small snapshot into the kind of data Facebook collects, then I highly recommend the Chrome plugin Data Selfie.
3. Facebook Engages In Political Censorship
Despite Facebook’s mission to have a society that is free and open, they have acted opposite to this goal by engaging in political censorship at a state level.
There have been many examples of this, such as their blocking a page announcing a protest in Russia, an action that was a direct order from the Russian government.
Another example is in China, where Facebook developed special software to censor users’ posts. They even went as far as censoring satire because a UK government agency complained. Facebook also censored two men kissing.
2. Facebook Will Happily Sell Your Data
Just when you think it can’t get worse than political censorship, you find out that anyone and everyone can get access to your data. Mastercard recently purchased Facebook data that details users’ online habits to uncover behavioral insights it can sell to banks. The intention is to merge Facebook’s data with their own so that they can also drive online sales.
Okay, Mastercard is a big company with lots cash. “Surely it wasn’t cheap,” you say. Well, one man spent $5 to acquire a total of one million Facebook users’ personal information. Facebook’s response was quite scary. They requested that the man send them the file, delete it from his computer, and “keep quiet.”
1. Facebook Knows When You Are Sleeping
Through the Facebook Messenger app, users can see when someone was last active. Intrigued, a developer by the name of Soren Louv-Jansen started to look into this a bit more. By correlating user IDs with a time stamp, he was actually able to build a graph of all his friends’ sleeping patterns.
One hacker went even further and discovered that you could find out what device people were last active on. What an excellent way to freak out your friends. Just don’t use any of this information to open up to a girl you’ve had a crush on for a long time. It will make things weird. Fast.
Privacy Call To Limit Power Usage Monitoring June 22 2017 | From: RadioNewZealand
Smart meters that relay half-hourly power usage are a potential risk to people's personal security and privacy, and standards should be set to curb data collection, Privacy Commissioner John Edwards says.
The commissioner said about 70 percent of households in New Zealand have smart meters.
The devices automatically record and transmit power usage data in half hourly intervals, but that information can also reveal much about the comings and goings of people in a household at a given time.
The information is collected by electricity retailers like Meridian or Mercury, who use it to prepare their bills. It is then passed on to lines companies under information-sharing pacts.
Mr Edwards said it could indicate when people were out, at home or in the shower - and this could put their security at risk if abused.While this had not yet happened it was important to set standards in advance, he said.
The trend all over the world was to require that collection of data about people's private lives be kept to a minimum, he said.
Click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
"It's going to be quite easy to figure out whether somebody lives alone, what kind of hours they're most likely to be home, what time they have their shower, what kind of appliances they have in their premises.
So when you're starting to get that level of detail it's time I think to sharpen up your policies on personal information."
In an open letter to the industry (PDF, 118KB), Mr Edwards recommended electricity companies ensure that personal information was not collected unnecessarily or held for longer than it had to be.
He also suggested aggregating data into clusters to cover an entire community, or all the people in a street, rather than recording data on individual homes.
That would be enough to provide information that network companies needed when planning to make economically justified investments.
Lines Companies Defend Data Collection
The electricity retailers' chief lobbyist, Jenny Cameron, said some lines companies had been seeking far more information lately than they usually did, which had caused her group to go to the Privacy Commissioner.
"We see the issue as three-fold," she said.
"One is getting data requests that are large - such as three years of half-hour data at individual level.
The second issue is that we want to be sure that it is legitimately being used for network planning purposes.
The third reason is, how is the data being protected?"
The Electricity Networks Association insisted the data its members gathered was safeguarded.
Chief executive Graeme Peters said there was nothing new in what his members were doing - data on customers has been collected for about a century.
And it was more necessary now than ever because of pending electricity reforms, he said.
"We are looking at more cost reflective pricing and we need to get access to data on customer demand at half-hourly intervals and the peaks [of their usage].
That data will be protected - our companies have got privacy statements - [we want] data around how much power might be consumed in a half-hour interval or the absolute peak of electricity that the customer is using in any one day."
Snowden Smashes The Police State In The Most Epic Rant Ever, ‘Terrorists Don’t Take Our Rights, Government Does’ June 3 2017 | From: TheFreeThoughtProject / Various “Terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom,” the former NSA contractor asserted, “they don’t even know what our freedoms are... Terrorists are incapable of destroying our rights or diminishing our society they lack the strength - only we can do that.” - Edward Snowden
Whistleblower Edward Snowden does not mince words, and his ardent assessment of our perpetually-dwindling rights in the United States and around the world - offered live in a teleconference Tuesday - certainly didn’t break that mold.
“Government will not act in accordance with the public interest unless it is made to,” Snowden contended, beginning what would arguably be one of the most powerful public appearances since he blew the whistle and the U.S.’ Intelligence Community’s expansive surveillance programs in 2013.
“You may never be safe in any country - whether it’s Brussels, or Russia, or Portugal, or the United States - to speak a necessary, but inconvenient, truth,” he continued, addressing the erosion of free speech, and a lack of justice for those who exercise that right.
Terrorism won’t be combated by governments - nor by invasive surveillance. Rather, Snowden argues, such programs have proven more harmful, overall. For instance:
““the United Kingdom passed the … most extreme surveillance law in the history of the Western World last year - it’s called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It authorizes objectively obscene intrusions into the public’s ability to communicate, to interact, to relate to one another, to engage in industry, to trade - without interference - so long as they’re not doing anything wrong."
“This is justified, of course, as a means of combating terrorism.”
Snowden stressed that nation-states invariably target the most extreme speech in platforms such as social media - posts by literal terrorists, child abuse, and other “things that are unobjectively contentious” - but the purview of governmental censorship and surveillance extends far beyond such broadly objectionable items.
However, “there is no public evidence showing that these policies are effective; that they save lives; that they make us safer.
But there is clear evidence that they cause harm to the public. We have seen people fall on blacklists.
We have seen, again and again throughout history, political parties be hamstrung, to face resistance, to be silenced by governments - because of their politics, because of their beliefs, because of their ideologies - which, over time, are always derived from what state security agencies say is a necessary effort to protect the nation.
“I’m not going to so far to say this is sort of an evil plan on behalf of the United Kingdom or any other nation, but we need to focus on one thing, the need for speech, access to free speech, free association, a free press, the ability to pick up a phone and be able to dial someone that you love without worrying about what that looks like in government database somewhere - how that will be reviewed ten years from now, when you get on a politician’s bad side."
He added, echoing statements made in previous public appearances;
“Arguing that you don’t care about free speech, because you have nothing to hide; arguing that you don’t care about the censorship of the Internet, because you’re not a criminal … is like arguing you don’t care about freedom of speech, because you have nothing to say.”
Delving into the crucial topic of how we, as a people, can work to thwart abusive overreach by governments - including imperious censorship by a State surreptitiously working to quash dissension, Snowden asserted,
“We need the right of disagreeing. We need the right of dissent. And that means, ladies and gentlemen, we need the right to speak out - even if it’s objectionable. Even if it’s offensive. Even if it’s problematic.
“The way to defeat bad ideas, the way to discredit terrorist ideas, is not by driving them into the shadows. It’s not by censoring them from public spaces.”
Prohibiting such cadres of dangerous thought from seeing the light of day, in effect, creates an echo chamber, hidden from criticism, thus, amplifying perilous ideas - without challenge.
Censorship and suppression isn’t necessary, Snowden continued, because “these ideas are not attractive; these ideas grow best in the dark.
“If you want to defeat terrorism, if you want to cast down radicalism, don’t hide it in the dark - drag it out into the light. And on the stage of the world, show people why it’s wrong. And why we can do better.”
“Terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom,” the former NSA contractor asserted,“they don’t even know what our freedoms are… Terrorists are incapable of destroying our rights or diminishing our society they lack the strength - only we can do that.”
Lambasted as a traitor to the United States by some and hailed as a hero defender of human rights and constitutional protections by others, Snowden dismissed this dichotomous criticism as entirely moot, stating,
“I say, it doesn’t matter what you think of me as a person. It doesn’t matter if you think I’m the best person in the world, it doesn’t matter if you think I’m the worst person in the world - the facts are the facts, regardless. They are discoverable.
And - more import than what people think about me or my reputation - is what you think about what’s going on in the world. What you’re going to do about it. Do you have the capability to influence power, to change the world in a positive direction.”
Changing the world for the better, Snowden told the predominantly German audience attending the Estoril teleconference, begins and ends with all of us - and the imperative of vigilance against encroachment by government on all our rights.
“Rights are lost by cowardly laws that are passed in moments of panic,” he said. “Rights are lost to the cringing complicity of leaders who fear the loss of their office more than the loss of our liberties.”
“It’s not enough to believe that something’s wrong,” Snowden attested. “It’s not enough to disagree with it. It’s not enough to think that things could be better.
“You have to stand for something. You have to go out there and risk something. You have to dare yourself to actually get out there and change the world - even if in a small way, even if only for one person, even if for only one instant, you lay down a brick upon which everyone else can build.”
“That, ladies and gentlemen,” Snowden concluded, “is the only way the world has ever gotten better.”
A Smart Home Mega Sensor Can Track What Goes On In A Room + EKG Evidence That Smart Meters Negatively Affect The Human Heart May 27 2017 | From: Enadget / WakingTimes / Various
The concept digests all environmental data in a space to trigger IoT routines.
Creating a smart home currently requires either linking every connected device one-by-one or adding sensor tags to old appliances to make a cohesive IoT network, but there might be an easier way.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed a concept for a hub that, when plugged into an electrical outlet, tracks ambient environmental data -- essentially becoming a sensor that tracks the whole space. With this in hand, savvy programmers can use it to trigger their own connected home routines.
Synthetic Sensors: Towards General-Purpose Sensing
We explore the notion of general-purpose sensing, wherein a single, highly capable sensor can indirectly monitor a large context, without direct instrumentation of objects.
Further, through what we call Synthetic Sensors, we can virtualize raw sensor data into actionable feeds, while simultaneously mitigating immediate privacy issues. We deployed our system across many months and environments, the results of which show the versatility, accuracy and potential of our approach.
The researchers introduced their sensor nexus -- dubbed Synthetic Sensors -- this week at ACM CHI, the human-computer interaction conference. As the video demonstrates, just plug it into a USB wall port and it automatically collects information about its surroundings, uploading it to a cloud back-end over WiFi.
Machine learning on the device parses results into recognizable events, like recognizing a particular sound pattern as "dishwasher is running" -- making them "synthetic" sensors. Folks can use them as digital triggers for other IoT behaviors. For example, one could use "left faucet on" to activate a room's left paper towel dispenser -- and automatically schedule a restock when its supply runs low.
There's one sensor missing from the device's suite, though: A camera. Its creators are sensitive to privacy issues, which is also why raw environmental data isn't uploaded to the cloud -- just the analyzed results.
The Synthetic Sensor is still in a prototype phase, but it's a promising replacement for the jumble of individual tags needed to hook up old appliances or proprietary smart devices.
Ever wondered why your energy supplier and governments are so keen to give you a smart meter?
We lay out some not-so-good reasons in this 4 minute animation. Your private data, lifestyle and behavioural
choices can be amalgamated into a data-set that is monetised and sold to 3rd party companies. Our usual
satire of dark subjects aim to entertain and inform you.
EKG Evidence That Smart Meters Negatively Affect The Human Heart
There have been numerous whistleblowers to warn of the negative effects of smart meters on human health but perhaps none has been so successful in scientifically proving this claim as Warren Woodward of Sedona, Arizona.
He recently put AMI ‘smart’ meters to the test, and using EKG technology, has proven that smart meters throw the human heart off its balanced beat.
A smart meter digitally sends information about your energy usage to utility companies, ostensibly, so that they can monitor your home remotely. Aside from giving companies access to a trove of information (which can then be used to manipulate energy prices, etc.), these meters infringe on our privacy, and have been said to cause numerous adverse health conditions.
In a first-of-its-kind, video-taped, scientifically documented presentation, Woodward shows how a smart meter adversely affects the human heart in the YouTube video below.
Woodward sits next to a smart meter that is used in Arizona, but that are also commonly used in many countries.
Many people have complained of adverse health conditions, among them:
Fatigue
Headache
Ringing in the ears
Insomnia
Eye problems
Leg cramps
Difficulty balancing
Heart problems
EMF exposure has been documented as being harmful before, but this is the first time someone has shown what EMF in the form of smart meters do to the human heart directly.
Woodward points out that in his rural location there is cell phone coverage, but that the EMF from cell towers is low intensity. Due to his location, there are no other forms of EMF that he is being exposed to.
Triggering Agents of Electromagnetic Sensitivity
Dr. Rea presented his compelling evidence and recommendations for a healthier world at Creating Safe Havens in a Toxic, Electromagnetic World, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Building-Biology & Ecology.
He also attempts to do a controlled test by hooking himself up to the EKG while not knowing when the smart meter is on or off, so that his body cannot anticipate a response, nor can he affect his heart rhythm with his own free will.
He has no health conditions, and is on no medications, however, when he is exposed to the smart meter, his heart skips beats – literally.
Any device that affects the functioning of the heart should be of profound concern. To wit, Pao L. Chang writes:
“The heart is one of the most important organs in the human body, because it is one of the main mediums for connecting us to each other and the Universe. Conventional science has taught us that the main role of the heart is to pump blood to all the systems of our body.
This definition of the heart is not very accurate. Besides pumping blood, the heart also has an intelligence of its own.
According to neurocardiologists, 60 to 65 percent of heart cells are neuron cells, not muscle cells. This discovery has helped them develop experiments that have proved the heart works similar to the brain and in some ways is even superior to the brain.
This may be the reason that the heart is the first organ to function after conception. Within about 20 days after conception, the heart starts to function, but the brain does not function until after roughly 90 days. This information tells us that the brain is secondary to the heart.”[1]
Knowing what we do now about the intelligence of the heart, and how intimately it is linked to the endocrine system, the nervous system, and even to the signaling of the brain and gut – how would you imagine smart meters might be affecting your neuro-psycho-biology? Is this yet another (attempted) way to control the innate intelligence of the population at large?
EKG Proof That "Smart" Meters Affect the Human Heart
Everyone's health is being affected by "smart" meters. The evidence in this video is a world first, and shifts the debate from whether anyone should have to pay a fee to refuse a "smart" meter to: When does the safety recall start?
We now know that even if people are not showing outward symptoms, their bodies are being unnecessarily and involuntarily stressed by "smart" meters. There must be a complete safety recall of all "smart" meters at once.
According to the Edison Foundation, there are more than 70 million smart meters currently installed, with 90 million expected to be up and running by 2020.
Need another reason to go off-grid?
The Digital Revolution Is A Catastrophe May 15 2017 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / NewYorkTimes / Various
Why did the US National Security Agency develop a hacking tool to install malware? Why is the US Security agency so incompetent that it could not prevent itself from being hacked and the tool stolen and used against 12 countries?
Ambulance staff at a National Health Service hospital in London on Friday. Several hospitals across Britain were hit by a large-scale cyberattack, causing failures to computer systems
The digital revolution is proving to be a nightmare. The digital revolution has destroyed privacy and has made all information and all persons insecure.
The costs of the digital revolution exceed its benefits by many times. The digital revolution rivals nuclear weapons as the most catastrophic technology of our time.
Hackers exploiting malicious software stolen from the National Security Agency executed damaging cyberattacks on Friday that hit dozens of countries worldwide, forcing Britain’s public health system to send patients away, freezing computers at Russia’s Interior Ministry and wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers elsewhere.
The attacks amounted to an audacious global blackmail attempt spread by the internet and underscored the vulnerabilities of the digital age.
Transmitted via email, the malicious software locked British hospitals out of their computer systems and demanded ransom before users could be let back in - with a threat that data would be destroyed if the demands were not met.
By late Friday the attacks had spread to more than 74 countries, according to security firms tracking the spread. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, said Russia was the worst-hit, followed by Ukraine, India and Taiwan. Reports of attacks also came from Latin America and Africa.
The attacks appeared to be the largest ransomware assault on record, but the scope of the damage was hard to measure. It was not clear if victims were paying the ransom, which began at about $300 to unlock individual computers, or even if those who did pay would regain access to their data.
Security experts described the attacks as the digital equivalent of a perfect storm. They began with a simple phishing email, similar to the one Russian hackers used in the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other targets last year.
They then quickly spread through victims’ systems using a hacking method that the N.S.A. is believed to have developed as part of its arsenal of cyberweapons. And finally they encrypted the computer systems of the victims, locking them out of critical data, including patient records in Britain.
The connection to the N.S.A. was particularly chilling. Starting last summer, a group calling itself the “Shadow Brokers” began to post software tools that came from the United States government’s stockpile of hacking weapons.
The attacks on Friday appeared to be the first time a cyberweapon developed by the N.S.A., funded by American taxpayers and stolen by an adversary had been unleashed by cybercriminals against patients, hospitals, businesses, governments and ordinary citizens.
Something similar occurred with remnants of the “Stuxnet” worm that the United States and Israel used against Iran’s nuclear program nearly seven years ago. Elements of those tools frequently appear in other, less ambitious attacks.
The United States has never confirmed that the tools posted by the Shadow Brokers belonged to the N.S.A. or other intelligence agencies, but former intelligence officials have said that the tools appeared to come from the N.S.A.’s “Tailored Access Operations” unit, which infiltrates foreign computer networks. (The unit has since been renamed.)
The attacks on Friday are likely to raise significant questions about whether the growing number of countries developing and stockpiling cyberweapons can avoid having those same tools purloined and turned against their own citizens.
They also showed how easily a cyberweapon can wreak havoc, even without shutting off a country’s power grid or its cellphone network.
In Britain, hospitals were locked out of their systems and doctors could not call up patient files. Emergency rooms were forced to divert people seeking urgent care.
In Russia, the country’s powerful Interior Ministry, after denying reports that its computers had been targeted, confirmed in a statement that “around 1,000 computers were infected,” which it described as less than 1 percent of its total. The ministry, which oversees Russia’s police forces, said technicians had contained the attack.
Some intelligence officials were dubious about that announcement because they suspect Russian involvement in the theft of the N.S.A. tools.
But James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said he suspected that criminals operating from Eastern Europe acting on their own were responsible.
"This doesn’t look like state activity, given the targets that were hit,” he said.
Those targets included corporate computer systems in many other countries - including FedEx in the United States, one of the world’s leading international shippers, as well as Spain’s Telefónica and Russia’s MegaFon telecom giant.
It could take months to find who was behind the attacks- a mystery that may go unsolved. But they alarmed cybersecurity experts everywhere, reflecting the enormous vulnerabilities to internet invasions faced by disjointed networks of computer systems.
There is no automatic way to “patch” their weaknesses around the world.
"When people ask what keeps you up at night, it’s this,” said Chris Camacho, the chief strategy officer at Flashpoint, a New York security firm tracking the attacks.
Mr. Camacho said he was particularly disturbed at how the attacks spread like wildfire through corporate, hospital and government networks.
Another security expert, Rohyt Belani, the chief executive of PhishMe, an email security company, said the wormlike capability of the malware was a significant shift from previous ransom attacks.
“This is almost like the atom bomb of ransomware,” Mr. Belani said, warning that the attack “may be a sign of things to come.”
The hackers’ weapon of choice on Friday was Wanna Decryptor, a new variant of the WannaCry ransomware, which encrypts victims’ data, locks them out of their systems and demands ransoms.
Researchers said the impact and speed of Friday’s attacks had not been seen in nearly a decade, when the Conficker computer worm infected millions of government, business and personal computers in more than 190 countries, threatening to overpower the computer networks that controlled health care, air traffic and banking systems over the course of several weeks.
One reason the ransomware on Friday was able to spread so quickly was that the stolen N.S.A. hacking tool, known as “Eternal Blue,” affected a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows servers.
Hours after the Shadow Brokers released the tool last month, Microsoft assured users that it had already included a patch for the underlying vulnerability in a software update in March.
Privacy activists said if that were the case, the government would be to blame for the fact that so many companies were left vulnerable to Friday’s attacks.
But Microsoft, which regularly credits researchers who discover holes in its products, curiously would not say who had tipped the company off to the issue. Many suspected that the United States government itself had told Microsoft, after the N.S.A. realized that its hacking method exploiting the vulnerability had been stolen.
It takes time for companies to roll out systemwide patches, and by notifying Microsoft of the hole only after the N.S.A.’s hacking tool was stolen, activists say the government would have left many hospitals, businesses and governments susceptible.
“It would be deeply troubling if the N.S.A. knew about this vulnerability but failed to disclose it to Microsoft until after it was stolen,” Patrick Toomey, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said on Friday.
“These attacks underscore the fact that vulnerabilities will be exploited not just by our security agencies, but by hackers and criminals around the world.”
During the Obama administration, the White House created a process to review software vulnerabilities discovered by intelligence agencies, and to determine which should be “stockpiled” for future offensive or defensive cyberoperations and which should be reported to the companies so that they could be fixed.
Last year the administration said that only a small fraction were retained by the government. But this vulnerability appeared to be one of them, and it was patched only recently, suggesting that the N.S.A. may have concluded the tool had been stolen and therefore warned Microsoft.
But that was clearly too little, and far too late.
On Friday, hackers took advantage of the fact that vulnerable targets - particularly hospitals - had yet to patch their systems, either because they had ignored advisories from Microsoft or because they were using outdated software that Microsoft no longer supports or updates.
The malware was circulated by email. Targets were sent an encrypted, compressed file that, once loaded, allowed the ransomware to infiltrate its targets. The fact that the files were encrypted ensured that the ransomware would not be detected by security systems until employees opened them, inadvertently allowing the ransomware to replicate across their employers’ networks.
Employees at Britain’s National Health Service had been warned about the ransomware threat earlier on Friday. But it was too late. As the disruptions rippled through at least 36 hospitals, doctors’ offices and ambulance companies across Britain, the health service declared the attack a “major incident,” warning that local health services could be overwhelmed.
Britain’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was briefed by cybersecurity experts, while Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said on television that “we’re not aware of any evidence that patient data has been compromised.”
As the day wore on, dozens of companies across Europe, Asia and the United States discovered that they had been hit with the ransomware when they saw criminals’ messages on their computer screens demanding $300 to unlock their data.
But the criminals designed their ransomware to increase the ransom amount on a set schedule and threatened to erase the hostage data after a predetermined cutoff time, raising the urgency of the attack and increasing the likelihood that victims would pay.
Without the ability to decrypt their data on their own, security experts said that victims who had not backed up their data were faced with a choice: Either live without their data or pay. It was not clear how many victims ultimately paid.
Security experts advised companies to immediately update their systems with the Microsoft patch.
Until organizations use the Microsoft patch, Mr. Camacho said, they could continue to be hit- not just by ransomware, but by all kinds of malicious tools that can manipulate, steal or delete their data.
"There is going to be a lot more of these attacks,” he said. “We’ll see copycats, and not just for ransomware, but other attacks.”
Here’s How You Stop Internet Censorship May 7 2017 | From: Infowars
The Internet was taken away from 'the people'.
A newly-founded non-profit group, Free Our Internet, launched to oppose Soros-funded Internet censorship, has launched a new campaign, #ReportTheBans, inviting participants to report personal experiences.
“If your voice has ever been silenced by the Internet Censorship Bureau, we want the details,” a #ReportTheBans page on the Free Our Internet website offers.
The #ReportTheBans campaign invites Internet users to “Tell Your Story,” with a box to check requesting confidentiality.
Free Our Internet highlights the campaign with the “amazing admission” from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who said on March 23, 2017:
"It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing for just take it off the page … right? … Put it somewhere else. Make it harder to find.”
A page on the Free Our Internet website presents a regularly updated list of the “tech-left’s coordinated campaign to silence free speech on the Internet.”
Among the instances cited is the vendor, hired by Google, that utilized a contractor ranking Infowars as “low-quality” content, in a story first posted online by independent journalist Mike Cernovich.
As Infowars reported on May 1, 2017, Free Our Internet’s goal is to educate Americans about how leftist super-elites and their powerful corporate allies have methodically used their wealth and political influence to erode the public’s Internet freedoms and wage war on alternative media.
Founded by Donald Trump’s Maine Campaign Director Christie-Lee McNally, Free Our Internet was organized to empower individuals who support free speech and expression online, protect the diversity of ideas, and oppose government actions that undermine Internet openness and transparency.
"For years, the left and their corporate allies in Silicon Valley have paid lip service to Internet freedom,” said McNally. “In reality, they work tirelessly to undermine that very freedom by supporting clandestine efforts to make the Internet less free.”
McNally stressed that under President Obama, the Internet was taken away from the American people.
"For the tech-left, the Internet isn’t about openness and protecting the diversity of ideas. It’s about relentlessly working to control online communication, manipulating America’s political discourse to promote their own agendas and line their own pockets,” McNally continued.
“The activist and political left has found common cause with Silicon Valley monopolies – the companies that actually control the platforms citizens depend on for information and to communicate with one another,” she stressed.
Facebook Is Working On A Smartphone That Can Read Thoughts May 2 2017 | From: VigilantCitizen
Facebook announced that it assembled a team of 60 people to develop a technology allowing users to “think” commands and messages at their smartphones. The system would be able to literally read your mind - constantly. What could go wrong?
The people at Facebook are going down a path that can only be described as post-Orwellian. Not satisfied with the fact that their users willingly share their most intimate information on a daily basis, Facebook is looking to reshape the world and decipher thoughts that haven’t even been verbalized.
In February, Mark Zuckerberg released the “Facebook Manifesto” which, under a thin veil of altruistic vocabulary, hid a dystopian vision of a “connected world” where the flow of information was overseen and propagated using artificial intelligence and elaborated algorithms. But that’s not enough.
On April 19th, the company revealed its most ambitious (and scary) project to date.
Regina Dugan, head of Facebook’s hardware innovation division Building 8, speaks at F8 – the company’s annual developer conference
Facebook has assembled a team of 60 people, including machine learning and neural prosthetics experts, brain-computer interface engineers and neural imaging engineers, to create a “mind reading” smartphone. It’s system would be capable of typing one hundred words per minute – straight from one’s thoughts.
"Facebook plans to develop non-invasive sensors that can measure brain activity hundreds of times per second at high resolution to decode brain signals associated with language in real time. “No such technology exists today; we’ll need to develop one.”
Facebook is looking at using optical imaging – using lasers to capture changes in the properties of neurons as they fire – to glean words straight from our brain before we say them. If these signals can be read, they can be transmitted silently to other people.
If the thought that a company that makes almost all of its money from harvesting your personal data could also have access to your thoughts is scary, that’s because it is.
Dugan attempted to assuage people’s fears by pointing out that Facebook would only decode the words you were going to say anyway. “It’s not about decoding random thoughts,” she said. “We’re talking about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.”
- The Guardian, Facebook has 60 people working on how to read your mind
So Facebook is telling people to not be concerned about their thoughts being constantly read by a machine because it would only be able to decode words one was “about to say”. However, the goal of that technology is to read thoughts – without them being said – and to translate them into computer commands.
How can a clear line be drawn between what can and cannot be read in the nebulous realm of human thought? How can we guarantee that this kind of technology won’t be used to actually monitor and control people’s thoughts?
Are there even people willing to give up the sanctuary of their own thoughts for the slight convenience of not moving one’s finger on a touchscreen?
Another reason why Facebook is looking to be able to read brainwaves is to push its augmented reality technology.
"Another reason why Facebook wants to read our brain activity is to develop the equivalent of a “brain mouse” for augmented reality.
She painted a picture of a future where everyone wears augmented reality glasses that supplement our field of vision with additional information such as directions, and enhanced capabilities such as real-time translation of people’s voice or the ability to “mute” specific people and noises from your soundscape.
What’s lacking in this augmented future is a user interface. When we don’t have a smartphone or a computer mouse, how can we select and click on a piece of digital content?
That’s where the brain-computer interface comes in."
- Ibid.
Facebook appears to be keen on answering questions nobody ever asked.
Although the technology is presented as a way of “staying connected with the people around us” reducing the need to look at one’s screen – the true goal of this technology is painfully obvious. They want to know what you’re thinking. All the time.
The US Is Now The Ultimate Police State: US Detains Journalist For Exercising Free Speech May 1 2017 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / Sputnik
The US is without any doubt now the worst police state, not only in reality exceeding Gestapo Nazi Germany, but exceeding the human imagination of George Orwell and other authors of dystopias.
And this utterly corrupt criminal police state gets away with pretending to be the “defender of democracy and freedom.” The insouciant American population has no clue. Freedom of speech is dead in America as are all other freedoms.
US intelligence reporter Barrett Brown was arrested, again, on Thursday morning for criticizing the US government while appearing on radio interviews.
“I would call the people who did this a bunch of chicken-sh*t a**holes that are brutalizing the Constitution,” Brown’s lawyer, Jay Leiderman, said following his client’s detainment.
"Brown first won acclaim for reporting on Stratfor’s intelligence operations directed against US civilians. The Justice Department told Bank of America that Stratfor would be ideally suited to conduct these operations.
As the tales of corporate espionage emerged, Brown reported on the leaks, which made waves due to the operations coinciding with the Occupy Wall Street movement."
The government tried to paint Brown as the person who leaked these documents, though he’d only reported on them. He initially faced a 100-year sentence. After pleading guilty to two charges pertaining to obstruction of justice and threatening an FBI agent, Brown’s sentence was knocked down to five years and three months. In sum, Brown’s helped spark the war on leaks that persists to this day.
Brown was put in handcuffs during a routine check-in, before being taken to an unknown facility. Since being released early from jail, Brown has not missed a single meeting with prison authorities.
Following his arrest, Brown told his mom he believes authorities brought him into custody over failure to gain “permission” to provide interviews with news outlets after he was released in November. Brown’s first exclusive interview was given to Radio Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary with the ever-affable Eugene Puryear.
Brown also spoke to Vice News last week and was slated to go on PBS Friday for another interview, and these appearances may be what landed him back in jail. So much for free speech.
"If this were happening in another country, [the US government] would deplore it,” former CIA clandestine operative Barry Eisley tweeted.
According to his mother, Brown said that the Bureau of Prisons never informed him that he would need to get special permission to do TV or radio interviews. Brown’s point of contact with the BOP, Luz Lujan, refused to give Brown “copies of program statement rules saying this is a requirement during halfway house and/or home confinement status.”
When Lujan finally got back to Brown after a week of not returning his calls, Brown received a form for reporters visiting an inmate in prison, the Intercept reported. The BOP also never showed Brown the document stating why he had to get permission.
"In other words, according to Brown, he was never provided a copy of the form he is now being arrested for not having filled out."
“You guys are going to carry out this, you guys are going to characterize this as a refusal of an order that they’re not giving me in writing,” Barrett said in a recorded conversation with his case manager. If failing to cooperate with BOP restrictions on interviews is the reason Brown was stripped of his freedoms during a routine meeting, that would be “disgusting,” his lawyer said, noting that the so-called restrictions seem to have been created on an improvised basis.
Update: "This is a terrible affront to the First Amendment," Leiderman told Sputnik News in an exclusive interview. Ironically, Brown was never required to get permissions to do interviews while he was previously in federal custody, Leiderman added.
Within the past two days, Brown was asked to produce "prior authorizations" to conduct interviews. "It came out of the blue," Leiderman continued. Brown never actually said no to getting the prior authorizations, but simply requested that the BOP furnish the policy manual which Lujan said was the reason Brown was being asked to get the permissions.
The counselor is "not aware" of any existing precedent where the BOP deployed this policy manual, which adds fire to the claim that this policy measure is being used against Brown personally.
Brown's words "are weapons of mass education, which is why they are targeting him."
Urgent National Security And International Terrorism Alert April 26 2016 | From: NesaraNews
The following was written to inform you of large-scale human rights violations and systematic physical attacks on the civilian population within all countries of the world using modern electromagnetic weapons and neuro-weapons, often in combination with non-consensual implants and covertly administered nanotechnology.
What makes these weapons particularly dangerous and devastating for societies is that they act covertly. Using the fact that electromagnetic waves propagate without being noticed by humans and can penetrate walls, these weapons can be used to destroy human life and permit the perpetrators to escape detection.
The systematic and clandestine nature of the crimes and their striking similarity around the world indicate that it is a global program run by the international military-intelligence complex committing premeditated mutilation, torture, systematic subjugation and a silent genocide of parts of the population.
It amounts to crimes against humanity and a global death camp program.
I am writing to formally request that under you statutory duty to investigate crimes against humanity, protect the civilian population from acts of terrorism, communicate matters of national importance to your government and uphold human rights, or otherwise, you pass on this message to the relevant authorities and you yourself act within your means to ensure that all victim cases are investigated and that these large-scale criminal operations are shut down in your country by 1st June 2017.
The actions you take in response to this communication will be followed up over the coming months and, should it turn out that you chose to ignore this notification and your duties to act to stop these crimes and to support the victims, you might be charged with, for example, official misconduct, malfeasance in office, dereliction of duty, conspiracy, aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, high treason or your legal system's equivalent of such offences.
Should that be the case, you will be called to account and held liable in one of the upcoming court or tribunal cases for crimes against humanity.
The attacks on victims are launched from mobile directed energy weapon units as well as telecommunication infrastructure such as cell towers and satellite systems. This is an integrated weapons system that has been built up covertly around the world.
The weapons system is now fully operational around the world and is destroying innocent victims' life in the millions and is subverting nations covertly.
Individual victims are hounded and tormented by the national surveillance networks, encircled by perpetrators at all times and systematically tortured and mutilated with electromagnetic as well as ultrasonic weapons in public as well as in their homes.
The assaults exploit the fact that beams from electromagnetic weapons are silent, invisible and can penetrate the walls of buildings such that victims can be assaulted everywhere without leaving traces that lead back to the perpetrators.
By these means, victims are effectively placed into individual concentration camps that are erected around them by the intelligence agencies, corrupted members of law enforcement and their network of criminal operatives.
This operation is accompanied by targeted slander campaigns, infiltration and subversion of every aspect of victims' life, including their social circle, their family, their work place and especially their medical care.
Operatives enter victims' home clandestinely, damage property, sabotage computer equipment directly or remotely, poison food and run harassment campaigns to psychologically disintegrate the victims so that they are eventually driven to suicide or are murdered.
The electromagnetic and neuro-weapons have capabilities that transcend anything that the world has experienced in terms of weapons technology in the past.
Due to their ability to attack and manipulate biological processes, inner organs and the human nervous system as well as neurological processes, these devices are the most dangerous weapons produced by mankind to date.
The effect on humans is devastating as the weapons can simulate many illnesses, cause pain and organ damage, brain damage, strokes, heart attacks and death. The most common form of harm through the use of these weapons is DNA damage and tumour formation and eventually cancer.
DNA damage in the reproductive eggs of women alters the mitochondrial DNA and thus damages entire future generations. The operations of these weapon systems is therefore a threat to the future of humanity itself.
Another insidious aspect of these weapons is that they can be used to impair, alter and control human bodily functions, movement, behaviour and even thought processes often without the realisation of the victim.
This can be used to subvert the functioning of every aspect of human endeavour from personal relationships, business endeavours, to democratic processes and the national security infrastructure of a nation.
Mobile directed energy weapons come in all sizes and have various capabilities. They are hidden by the perpetrators in adjacent properties, cars, drones, planes and even parts of the national infrastructure. Agents of the surveillance networks carry assault weapons in bags and rucksacks.
This covert weapons system is fully integrated and centrally controlled. Victims who fled to other countries discovered that their assault protocol travels with them and is continued by the local surveillance and law enforcement system in whichever country they reside.
From what could be established from declassified documents, the organisational matrix of the assault teams follows the protocol used for the death squads run by the large intelligence agencies in, for example, Vietnam and South American countries. It is of paramount importance for national security to stop this terrorism and shut down the funding and the systems that enable its proliferation.
The weapons technology itself has largely been classified for a very long time. There are, however, countless publicly known cases from around the world where the weapons have been applied to individuals over many years with the intent to intimidate, torture, maim and murder.
From the testimonies of those victims, many of whom have shared their plight online on blogs and through social media, publicly known patents and declassified documents, we know of the devastating effect of these weapons and the staggering scale of the crimes being committed around the world. Please assist us in stopping this global silent Holocaust.
Confronting A Tyrannical System Without Firing A Single Shot April 21 2016 | From: Geopolitics
If you take it to heart all that’s been happening inside the United States, the European Union, and in the Middle East, you’ll fall into a depression which you may not be able to recover in time.
“I’m exhausted trying to figure out what’s the truth,” said Margaret Treis.
Understand that inducing psychological stress on the population is one of the potent weapons of the enemy. Forcing you to raise the white flag of surrender by projecting their total control of the government and institutions should be too obvious by now.
We believe that the best response other than confronting the enemy head on would be to elevate ourselves into a winning position, and not stick around with the same system that they are already in full control of.
It is absolutely unwise to try to reform a system that can be hijacked by any aggressive forces, anytime they want.
Establishing a parallel system that does away with all the limitations of the old, like the internet in lieu of the corporate media, is the only way to go.
Other options will surely come when the mind has rested. So, you may opt for a long vacation for the time being, like what Louis Marinelli of the Independent California Movement is doing.
The Leader of ‘Calexit’ Just Announced He’s Abandoning the Movement and Settling Permanently in Russia
"Natasha Bertrand Apr. 17, 2017, 6:31 PM
The leader of California separatist group Yes California announced in a 1,600-word statement on Monday that he “intends to make Russia” his “new home” and is therefore withdrawing his petition for a “Calexit” referendum.
Louis Marinelli
Louis Marinelli, who has spearheaded the Calexit campaign since 2015, set up a makeshift embassy in Moscow in December in partnership with far-rightRussian nationalists who enjoy Kremlin support while promoting secessionist movements in Europe.
“I have found in Russia a new happiness, a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment towards ones’ homeland, and a future detached from the partisan divisions and animosity that has thus far engulfed my entire adult life,” Marinelli wrote on Monday.
“Consequently, if the people of Russia would be so kind as to welcome me here on a permanent basis, I intend to make Russia my new home.”
He added that he will “not return to California in the forseeable future,” so “it is only proper” that he withdraw the Calexit ballot initiative petition and “allow a new petition, free from ties to me and drafted by others, to be resubmitted at future date of their choosing.”
… “We don’t think that Russia needs to be an enemy of California, or that it even is one to begin with,” Marinelli said. “The idea that Russia is an enemy of the US - that’s a Cold War mentality.”
Marinelli, who campaigned for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders but said he ultimately voted for President Donald Trump, described Yes California as a progressive initiative aimed at establishing a “liberal republic” independent of the United States…
Marinelli reiterated on Monday that he does “not wish to live under the American flag,” adding that his “frustrations” with the American political system have now pointed him toward Russia.
“I had long planned to eventually return to occupied California and struggle for her independence from the United States so we could build the kind of country that reflects our progressive values,” Marinelli wrote. “However, while my frustration, disappointment and disillusionment with the United States remains, these feelings now point me in a different direction.”
He added that he hopes that “after the false allegations about me vanish, and after this period of anti-Russian hysteria subsides,” it will be “said of this campaign that we spoke the truth” and “set in motion a series of events that led California to independence from the United States.”
The whole idea is not to fall to the “if you can’t beat them, join them” trap. That’s only reserved for the weak, and traitors to freedom and humanity itself.
We must take this opportunity to rise instead, and show the enemies of freedom what erect human beings are truly capable of. We should stop feeding evil and all that it represents, by creating another world of good and wise.
If in the course of living independently off-the-grid, the fascist corporate government will come knocking at your door, with the full intent of doing you harm - that should be the best time you give them hell. But before that even happens, you can increase your winnability by engaging a greater number of people into your cause.
Imagine, if others are seeing the benefits and real value of your efforts along the way, and be open to engage them in a collaborative fashion, you should be able to pack a bigger punch to the old system.
As long-time guests on this website have known, we are already making healthcare virtually free by employing eTherapy protocols described in our healthcare website. That should free everyone from the high costs of hospitalization and danger of mainstream medicine. The delay in the constructions of nuclear fusion-fission hybrid system around the globe is not acceptable. Not everyone could replicate Keshe plasma and other even more effective systems.
However, one can also do a “brute force” approach and buy a complete industrial type HHO system; add a second alternator, or solar panels, to your car; explore the use of supercapacitors in parallel with the installed car battery, so that you can have enough DC power on demand, to split water into HHO gas and be free from oil cartels for good.
An independent food production can also be done with vertical farming for urban dwellers, and permaculture if adequate farmland is available. Establishing a local exchange trading system [LETS] should facilitate the exchange of goods and services away from the bankers.
These three independent sources of food, healthcare, and energy alone are enough to free oneself from corporate tyranny which continue to plague the population. Having a parallel debt-free system for exchange should bankrupt the corrupt system for good.
Again, that’s for people who are not ready yet for a protracted civil war, or when war veterans remain apathetic to the whole situation. A surgical covert operation targeting specific personalities would have been the most preferable course of action.
Nobody said that all of the above are going to be easy. No real revolution actually is. But there’s nothing worse than prolonging the agony.
Is Australia Becoming A Fascist State? & Study Says DTP Vaccine Associated With 212% Increased Infant Mortality Risk April 19 2017 | From: VaccineInformationNetwork/ GreenMedInfo
New Australian Police State: Compulsory Vaccination
The Australian ex banker and globalist PM Malcolm Turnbull has announced that he wants to stop all unvaccinated children from attending childcare centres and preschools across Australia.
Our TV News here in New Zealand this morning showed part of the interview with him actually saying he would allow exemptions only with a doctor’s medical certificate and no longer would any other reason be accepted, including those from parents who have anti-vaccine views. You can read a report about the announcement here and watch this news clip:
As we’ve covered this tyranny so much before, I don’t want to repeat myself. However, thanks to the Internet, we can all appreciate just how well connected both Malcolm Turnbull and his wife really are.
If you look at this Wikipedia website, you will see that his wife Lucy Turnbull is the Chairman of the biotechnology/ immunotherapy company Prima BioMed Limited headquartered in Sydney Australia and Berlin Germany.
Commonly, this is called conflicting interests, or having the fox looking after the henhouse!
You will note also that this company has licensed its IMP701 antagonist monoclonal antibody to LAG3 for use in cancer drugs licensed to Novartis, the giant Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland, controlled by British Anglo / American bankers.
Although Novartis sold most of its giant vaccine manufacturing business to GlaxoSmithKline and CSL Limited in 2014 and 2015, it still has all sorts of cross interests and licence agreements with these and other giant pharmaceutical manufacturing companies as well.
They are all part of this one, huge, corrupt, global vaccine manufacturing cartel.
This is why Turnbull and his wife are so obsessively “pro-vaccination,” and through the Australian Government, URGENTLY want to force their fascist views on on all Australians, on behalf of these giant pharmaceutical companies.
The sad fact is that the way the Australian Government is going at present, Australia may become the first true DICTATORSHIP in the South Pacific very soon.
It’s not that the Turnbulls are unknown or new to most Australians. Lucy Turnbull is a former Lord Mayor of Sydney. She is the daughter of Tom Hughes, a former Attorney-General of Australia. Her great-great grandfather was Sir Thomas Hughes, the first Lord Mayor of Sydney.
Due to the general apathy and ignorance of most of the population, corrupt governments unfortunately find it all too easy to pass repressive legislation.
I wonder how far behind the Australians we will be here in New Zealand if more concerned people don’t urgently start speaking up.
Sorry are we in Nazi Germany? Up next tattoos on the forehead so we know who is and isn’t fully vaccinated!? A never ending media barrage.
Malcolm Turnbull now wants No Jab-No-Play-Nation-Wide so if your child is not fully vaccinated with between 14 to 16 different disease injections (in my day 5) – 37 doses of Vaccines by 18 months they are discriminated against and are unable to go to daycare, kindy or preschool.
Do you know the Adult register just started? Do you know over 65s are listed on the National Immunisation Schedule?
Do you know there is NO ceiling on the number of vaccines, doses or type that can and will be added to the schedule? How many more vaccines are you prepared to take?
How many more will our babies be forced into having? Are YOU up to date with the 14 to 16 different disease injections parents are intimidated and coerced into giving their children? How far is Australia going to let this go? What will it take for people to stand up and say enough is enough?
Up Next No Jab, No Job No Jab, No University Degree No Jab, No Pension No Jab, No Travel No Jab, No Doctor Time to WAKE UP AUSTRALIA – Mandatory Vaccination for EVERYONE is on your doorstep, I suggest people start voicing their concerns because if you don’t NAZI Germany with forced medical procedures soon be in Australia.
The World Health Organization introduced the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) in low-income countries in the 1970s with the goal of universal immunization for all children. In the introduction, the study’s authors state, “Except for the measles vaccines, surprisingly few studies examined the introduction of vaccines and their impact on child survival.”
The purpose of the study was to examine what happens to child survival when DTP and OPV were introduced in low-income countries. A community study [ii] of the state of nutrition and family structure found that severe malnutrition was not evident in urban Guinea-Bissau although it was initially assumed to be the main cause of the under-five mortality rate.
The study findings emerged from a child population that had been followed with 3-monthly nutritional weighing sessions since 1978. From June 1981 DTP and OPV were offered from 3 months of age at these sessions.
Due to the 3-monthly intervals between sessions, the children were allocated by birthday in a ‘natural experiment’ to receive vaccinations early or late between 3 and 5 months of age.
The study included children who were greater than 6 months of age when vaccinations started and children born until the end of December 1983. The researchers compared mortality between 3 and 5 months of age of DTP-vaccinated and not-yet-DTP- vaccinated children in Cox proportional hazard models.
When mortality was compared, the mortality hazard ratio (HR) among 3-5-month-old children having received the DTP (±OPV) was 5.00 compared with not-yet-DTP-vaccinated children [i.e. a 400% increase].
According to the authors, differences in background factors did not explain the effect.
All-cause infant mortality after 3 months of age increased after the introduction of these vaccines (2.12 (1.07–4.19)) [i.e. a 212% increase]. However, the study findings revealed the negative effect was particularly strong for children who had received DTP-only and no OPV (10.0 (2.61–38.6)).
The researchers concluded:
"DTP was associated with increased mortality; OPV may modify the effect of DTP.”
It appears this early Guinea-Bissau study foreshadowed a line of documented injury and mortality caused by the DPT. A 2000 BMJ article found that a population of vaccinated infants, also from Guinea-Bissau, receiving one dose of DTP or polio vaccines had higher mortality than children who had received none of these vaccines.
A 2004 observational study showed a doubling of the mortality rate of infants vaccinated with the single dose of DPT vaccine and increasing mortality rates after the second and third doses.[iii] A 2011 study of Guinea-Bissau females found DTP vaccine administered simultaneously with measles vaccine is also associated with increased morbidity and poor growth in girls.[iv]
In the United States, the DTP vaccine received major public spotlight and pushback after the 1985 book DPT: A Shot in the Dark was published tracing its development and describing its risks.
Recently complied reports show settlements of injury and deaths from the TDap, DTP, and DPT vaccines within the United States Vaccine Court jumped 75% from $5.5 million in 2014 to $9.8 million in 2015.
CIA Whistleblower Leaks 47 Hard Drives Exposing Obama Administration Spying April 6 2017 | From: Sott / Various
The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference stating that Trump and his transition team were under "incidental surveillance," Attorney and founder of Judicial Watch, Larry Klayman, sent a formal letter to the House Committee on Intelligence demanding they investigate the claims and evidence more than 40 hard drives over 600 million pages of information presented under oath at the FBI Field Office In Washington, DC by his client - CIA/NSA Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery.
Klayman claimed in a Newsmax report that Montgomery, "holds the keys to disproving the false claims that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped," however Montgomery's case was largely ignored.
"When Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was "blown off;" no one wanted to even hear what he had to say," the letter said.
This resulted in Montgomery contacting Attorney Klayman, who then approached the FBI:
"Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis, Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia. There he laid out how persons like then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information much of which is classified.
He sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly.
Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed "up close and personal" this "Orwellian Big Brother" intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House."
Allegations made by Montgomery claim that there was a, "systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump."
Montgomery's claims aren't new, as other whistleblowers have alleged the same. Former head of the NSA's digital spying team William Binney also came forward. Binney disclosed as fact the U.S. was spying on everyone in the U.S. and storing the data forever, and the U.S. was quickly becoming an Orwellian state. The Feds tried to intimidate him into shutting up:
"Numerous FBI officers held a gun to Binney's head as he stepped naked from the shower. He watched with his wife and youngest son as the FBI ransacked their home. Later Binney was separated from the rest of his family, and FBI officials pressured him to implicate one of the other complainants in criminal activity.
During the raid, Binney attempted to report to FBI officials the crimes he had witnessed at NSA, in particular the NSA's violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. However, the FBI wasn't interested in these disclosures.
Instead, FBI officials seized Binney's private computer, which to this day has not been returned despite the fact that he has not been charged with a crime.
On top of prior allegations, Russ Tice also alleged that the Obama administration tapped judges and SCOTUS. Tice continued to Sibel Edmond's BoilingFrogsPost and said they even "tapped members of Congress and the military."
Stratfor emails published by Wikileaks also showed the Democrats manipulated the 2008 presidential election, Business Insiderreported.
This means that Montgomery may have already had his evidence collaborated twice.
The FBI had Montgomery's testimony and evidence for over two years and did nothing despite having the holy grail of "intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes."
An additional claim was made by Tice to former RT host of Breaking The Set Abby Martin, that the Obama administration allegedly was "blackmailing officials" including former President Obama himself. Tice alleged that Obama was tapped back in 2004 as a Senator and that he saw the order.
"In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-some-year-old senator from Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It's a big White House in Washington D.C. That's who the NSA went after. That's the President of the United States now," Tice said.
Last Thursday, March 16th, 2017 - Klayman traveled to Washington DC. He was to meet with House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. He hoped that Nunes would listen and ask FBI Director, Comey, why the FBI failed to pursue Montgomery's evidence.
However, when Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was "blown off" and referred to committee attorney, Allen R. Souza - who Klayman then requested brief Nunes on the information.
"During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee's complicity in keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent cover-up of the Montgomery "investigation."
To this day, this is where it currently stands. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey's feet to the fire about the Montgomery investigation?
On Wednesday, March 22nd, 2017 - on an unrelated front; House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes noted that he did not know whether the "incident collection" of communications of Trump associates happened at Trump Tower. Nunes could not definitively say whether Trump's communications were directly collected.
Bilderberg Expert: Elite Are In Full Panic Mode
Alex Jones talks with Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin about how the elite are terrified of Donald Trump.
Nunes told reporters that, "I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored." He continued to say, "It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing."
Multiple sources continue to confirm that a massive storm of scandal is brewing. The previous Obama administration is involved and could potentially result in the arrest of several Obama-era officials swallowed in this 'storm of scandals' path.
Grab your popcorn! The fireworks have been set and are about to go off in Washington D.C. Even Bob Woodward has confirmed what we are hearing from the confines of the intelligence community and military, "there is a real serious problem for the people in the Obama administration."
Woodward, who made a name for himself covering Watergate stated that there are around 20 people in the 16-agency intelligence community who can order the unmasking, or "minimization," of individuals. Further, Trey Gowdy questioned FBI Director James Comey probing into who leaked General Flynn's identity to the media. Comey stated that "Obama political appointees had the ability to 'Unmask' American citizens."
"You can learn all kinds of things from diplomats gossiping because that's what occurs. Under the rules, and they are pretty strict, it's called minimization. You don't name the American person who is being discussed," Woodward said.
"It's, again, down the middle, it is not what Trump said, but this could be criminal on the part of people who decided, oh, let's name these people."
"Under the rules, that name is supposed to be blanked out, and so you've got a real serious problem potentially of people in the Obama administration passing around this highly classified gossip," Woodward added.
Australian Government Ramps Up $18.5M Citizen Surveillance With “The Capability” And “iOmniscient” Technology April 2 2017 | From: AnonHQ
Although surveillance has dominated society for years now, the Australian Federal Government has decided to catch up, now implementing the latest facial recognition technology to assist with thwarting terrorist attacks while recording every citizen's face and move.
Has Big Brother reached Australia? Concerned citizens of Queensland, Australia’s northern state, seem to think so. Privacy advocates are fearing the latest development in a facial recognition technology trial has overstepped the government boundaries.
Related: The Dark Intelligence State and the Judiciary
According to a latest ABC report “The Toowoomba Regional Council has begun trialling the software called iOmniscient on behalf of the Brisbane, Gold Coast and other councils.
“iOmniscient works by analysing images recorded by existing CCTV cameras.”
The Australian Federal Government is in support of the new technology, introducing similar rollouts in the Northern Territory to assist police, and also with the passport processing in Australia, reports the ABC News in Australia.
A law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, Dr Monique Mann, has said the decision is alarming on many levels.
According to Dr Mann, the introduction of facial recognition technology at a federal level will lead to privacy issues.
“It can be integrated with existing surveillance systems as we’re seeing with CCTV-enabled tracking through public faces,” she said.
“And it can also be integrated with other big data that’s used for law enforcement and security purposes - so for example images that can be taken from social media websites.”
Paul Antonio, Mayor of the Toowoomba Council since 2012, has rushed to defend the new software, saying it isn’t an invasion of privacy.
“It is attached to a data system that will tell us the number of people coming and going to the library, and the number of times they have actually come and gone in a given day,” he said.
“What it actually does is it analyses the existing CCTV footage that we’ve had here in this region for quite some time.”
Antonio further said this is specific to “improving service delivery” to the library, where the trial was nominated to take place, and is an “experiment.”
This comes at a time when increasing surveillance devices have been implemented not just in the state of Queensland but across the nation. Last month the Australian government announced a massive $18.5 million budget for facial recognition technology.
The Capability is another program to assist security agencies in scanning through up to 100 million facial images already on Australian databases. The images come from an array of databases including shopping centres, passport photos and drivers’ licenses.
Proponents for the use of The Capability include Justice Minister Michael Keenan, who says this new technology will assist in combating terrorism and organised crime. It keeps Australians safe by protecting their identity and it allows our law enforcement authorities to accurately and efficiently to identify someone who might take their interest,” he said.
Cyber Security analyst Patrick Gray spoke to the ABC in February, highlighting concerns. “This is a whole other league of creepy, this is a whole other league of invasive and the fact that there’s been no discussion around this is really weird.”
Deakin University criminology expert Adam Molnar also raised concerns for a “potential error rate of the technology.” Molnar raised the issue of “false positives” impacting on a person’s life.
"The FBI accepts a 20 per cent inaccuracy so that’s one in five images that could be false identification of an individual,” Molnar said.
Windows 10 Keeps Spying Even When All Privacy Options Are Turned Off & Did The Government Spy On Trump? Of Course. It Spies On All Of Us! April 1 2017 | From: Geopolitics/ Infowars
In addition to the vulnerability of Apple’s expensive gadgetry, iPhones and iMac, to CIA hacking, Bill Gates’ Windows 10 is surveilling its users by default, i.e. no need for the CIA to hack it anymore.
What this means is: your PC’s camera, microphone, and keystrokes are being recorded and stored in their cloud-based databases, for future reference.
We should not expect otherwise in the first place.
Windows 10 Will Keep Spying on You No Matter How Hard You Try to Stop It
When you boot up Windows 10 for the very first time, you have the option to customize several settings related to the collection of data from Microsoft’s servers.
You can stop your machine from sending contact and calendar details, typing and speech data, location data and even error and diagnostic reports. Unfortunately, no matter how many boxes you uncheck, Microsoft is still going to collect information from your computer, whether you know it or not.
In a Voat thread last week, a user by the name of CheesusCrust published his findings after running a network traffic analysis relating to the telemetry and surveillance features of Windows 10. The results were troubling, to say the least.
While setting up a fresh copy of Windows 10 Enterprise Edition on VirtualBox, the user went through and disabled all three pages of tracking options, one by one. He then left the computer running for eight hours overnight, and returned to find that Windows 10 had attempted to contact 51 Microsoft IP addresses 5,508 times.
After 30 hours, over 112 IP addresses had been contacted.
The user attempted the same experiment once again with a fresh install of Windows 10 as well as a third party tool called DisableWinTracking. He discovered that the name of the tool is slightly misleading, as Windows 10 had contacted 30 IP addresses 2,758 times in the same 30 hour time frame.
As Gordon Kelly explains over at Forbes, the end user license agreement (EULA) you sign to when you install Windows 10 gives Microsoft the legal right to collect this data. That’s all well and good, but Microsoft refuses to explain why it needs this data or how it improves Windows 10 in any meaningful way.
The most damning aspect of the entire investigation is the fact that Microsoft is lying to us when it gives us the ability to turn certain tracking features off. No matter what you do, or which settings you disable, Microsoft isn’t going anywhere.
To make matters worse, US senators just voted to allow your ISP to sell your browsing history without your prior permission.
ISP's Can Now Sell Your Browsing History Without Permission, Thanks to the Senate
The US Senate has voted to overturn consumer privacy laws enacted last year by the FCC. The rules, which forced internet service providers to actually get permission before selling your data, were overturned using the little-used Congressional Review Act (CRA).
Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal said before the vote that:
"This resolution is a direct attack on consumer rights, on privacy, on rules that afford basic protection against intrusive and illegal interference with consumers’ use of social media sites and websites that often they talk for granted.”
Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.
Assuming that this resolution passes through the House, which seems likely at this point, your broadband and wireless internet service provider will have free reign to collect and sell personal data along to third parties.
That information may include (but is not limited to!) location, financial, healthcare and browsing data scraped from customers. As a result of the ruling, you can expect ISPs to begin collecting this data by default. Some ISPs may choose to include an opt-out from data collection in account settings.
Still think that your representative truly represents you? The Corporate Deep State has been hacking the government and monarchies alike for centuries, all for the glory of the Vatican Empire.
Did the Government Spy On Trump? Of Course. It Spies On All Of Us!
President Trump should use Obama admin's surveillance as a teaching moment.
There was high drama last week when Rep. Devin Nunes announced at the White House that he had seen evidence that the communications of the Donald Trump campaign people, and perhaps even Trump himself, had been “incidentally collected” by the US government.
If true, this means that someone authorized the monitoring of Trump campaign communications using Section 702 of the FISA Act. Could it have been then-President Obama? We don’t know. Could it have been other political enemies looking for something to harm the Trump campaign or presidency? It is possible.
There is much we do not yet know about what happened and there is probably quite a bit we will never know. But we do know several very important things about the government spying on Americans.
First there is Section 702 itself. The provision was passed in 2008 as part of a package of amendments to the 1978 FISA bill. As with the PATRIOT Act, we were told that we had to give the government more power to spy on us so that it could catch terrorists.
We had to give up some of our liberty for promises of more security, we were told. We were also told that the government would only spy on the bad guys, and that if we had nothing to hide we should have nothing to fear.
We found out five years later from Edward Snowden that the US government viewed Section 702 as a green light for the mass surveillance of Americans. Through programs he revealed, like PRISM, the NSA is able to collect and store our Internet search history, the content of our emails, what files we have shared, who we have chatted with electronically, and more.
That’s why people like NSA whistleblower William Binney said that we know the NSA was spying on Trump because it spies on all of us!
Ironically, FISA itself was passed after the Church Committee Hearings revealed the abuses, criminality, and violations of our privacy that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had been committing for years. FISA was supposed to rein in the intelligence community but, as is often the case in Washington, it did the opposite: it ended up giving the government even more power to spy on us.
So President Trump might have been “wiretapped” by Obama, as he claimed, but unfortunately he will not draw the right conclusions from the violation. He will not see runaway spying on Americans as a grotesque attack on American values. That is unfortunate, because this could have provided a great teaching moment for the president.
Seeing how all of us are vulnerable to this kind of government abuse, President Trump could have changed his tune on the PATRIOT Act and all government attacks on our privacy. He could have stood up for liberty, which is really what makes America great.
Section 702 of the FISA Act was renewed in 2012, just before we learned from Snowden how it is abused. It is set to expire this December unless Congress extends it again.
Knowing what we now know about this anti-American legislation we must work hard to prevent its renewal. They will try to scare us into supporting the provision, but the loss of our liberty is what should scare us the most!
Former NSA Chief: Obama Illegally Surveilled Trump
Literary Agents Rethinking The Legacy Of Writers Who Worked With The CIA + Interview With Douglas Valentine: The CIA As Organized Crime April 1 2017 | From: NewRepublic / Sott
Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who defected to the West in 1951, was struck by the ostentatiousness of American cultural programs: “You could smell big money from a mile away.” The era’s finest little magazines, titles like Partisan Review and The Paris Review, published enduring fiction, poetry, and essays.
The writings of Clement Greenberg and Lionel Trilling set the high-water mark for art and literary criticism.
Richard Wright wrote the mournful poem that would provide the title for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 best-seller, Between the World and Me. The artists who waged the radical political battles of the 1930s emerged in the 1950s as cultural institutions, achieving a prominence - even a celebrity - that has eluded subsequent generations.
Plenty of observers, however, suspected that the free market of ideas had been corrupted. World tours, fancy conferences, prestigious bylines and book contracts were bestowed on artists who hewed to political positions favored by the establishment, rather than on the most talented.
In 1966, The New York Timesconfirmed suspicions that the CIA was pumping money into “civil society” organizations: unions, international organizations of students and women, groups of artists and intellectuals. The agency had produced the popular cartoon version of George Orwell’s anticommunist classic Animal Farm in 1954.
It flew the Boston Symphony Orchestra on a European tour in 1952, to counter prejudices of the United States as uncultured and unsophisticated. It promoted the work of abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock because their artistic style would have been considered degenerate in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The propriety of such largesse, both for the CIA and its beneficiaries, has been hotly debated ever since. Jason Epstein, the celebrated book editor, was quick to point out that CIA involvement undermined the very conditions for free thought, in which “doubts about established orthodoxies” were supposed to be “taken to be the beginning of all inquiry.”
But Gloria Steinem, who worked with the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s, “was happy to find some liberals in government in those days,” arguing that the agency was “nonviolent and honorable.”
Milosz, too, agreed that the “liberal conspiracy,” as he called it, “was necessary and justified.” It was, he allowed, “the sole counterweight to the propaganda on which the Soviets expended astronomical sums.”
Today’s intellectuals approach their labors in a very different set of circumstances. The struggle for academic patronage and the strained conditions of nearly all media properties have led to fewer jobs and fewer venues for substantial writing; the possibility of leading a public-facing life of the mind now seems vanishingly small, which only heightens nostalgia for the golden age of the 1950s.
Yet the shadow of the CIA lurks behind the achievements of that time. The free play of ideas - the very thing that was supposed to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union in the first place - turned out to be, at least in part, a carefully constructed illusion.
What if the prominence of midcentury intellectuals, the sense that they were engaged in important political and artistic projects, is inseparable from the fact that they were useful to America’s Cold War empire?
Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers insists that past glory and present disappointment are inextricably linked. He wants to show that the distinction some make between a “good,” literary CIA and a “bad” one that toppled leftists and subverted democracy around the globe is an artificial one.
Whitney argues that the government “weaponized” culture and helped create a compromised media that still serves, “in part, to encourage support for our interventions.” The term he uses in the title - “finks” - implies that the book’s subjects are disreputable actors, complicit in the crimes of the agency that supported their work.
The CIA still stonewalls efforts to understand its history, but journalists and scholars have been able to stitch together interviews and papers of the people and organizations that the agency supported to generate a picture of its activities. In this sense, Whitney picks up the investigative gauntlet thrown by the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders with the publication of her book Who Paid the Piper?in 1999.
As Saunders demonstrated, the CIA didn’t simply hand out money - it actively managed the organizations it supported. What’s more, she showed, many people who feigned ignorance were aware of the connection.
Saunders’s stance reflected the cultural mood of the late 1990s: With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it became easier both to acknowledge the dark side of American power and to see the Cold War as a pretext for U.S. actions rather than the cause of those actions.
Later historians, such as Hugh Wilford in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, have examined the varied reasons why groups and individuals agreed to work with CIA fronts. While Finks is more global than Saunders’s book, devoting more attention to the CIA’s influence from India to Latin America, it represents a return to her mode of exposing hypocritical alliances rather than explaining their historical motivations.
Whitney, like many of his subjects, is co-founder of a literary magazine (Guernica), and he’s the author of an intricate essay, published in Salon in 2012, on how the renowned Paris Review was implicated in the CIA’s program of cultural manipulation.
The novelist Peter Matthiessen started the magazine in 1953 with Harold “Doc” Humes, a writer who grew paranoid after overdosing on LSD that Timothy Leary gave him in 1965. In 1977, The New York Times revealed that Matthiessen had been working for the CIA when The Paris Review was founded, and that the magazine had served as part of his cover.
He later explained that when he was recruited, “the CIA was brand new, and they were not yet into political assassinations or the other ugly stuff that came later.” But he still insisted that he’d broken his CIA ties after a few years, and that The Paris Review had no further connection to the U.S. government.
Whitney’s investigations in The Paris Review’s archives, however, tell a different story. The magazine remains the great white whale of Finks: Whitney is ever chasing it, searching for its traces in the twilight depths of Cold War espionage. To achieve this, Whitney attempts to link The Paris Review to the central cog in the CIA’s Cold War propaganda machine: the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The CCF was founded in 1950 as a home for anticommunist intellectuals who wanted to combat the influence of European communists, fellow travelers, and neutralists. CIA dollars and personnel made it possible, even as the CCF quickly expanded into a global organization that operated magazines, conferences, and art galleries from Asia to South America.
At its height in the ’50s and ’60s, the CCF sponsored sophisticated, cosmopolitan magazines such as Preuves in France, Hiwar in Egypt, Quest in India, Mundo Nuevo in Spain and Latin America, and Encounter in London.
Mundo Nuevo was especially influential, publishing leftist writers of the generation of the “boom” in Latin American letters (like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez) alongside international authors like Susan Sontag and Harold Pinter. Still, the CIA felt free to nix articles and exercise prior review. “Brand America’s sales team,” writes Whitney, “thought little of fostering cultural freedom through routine acts of censorship.”
The Paris Review, however, was not part of the CCF. Unlike the CCF magazines, which were generally both political and literary, The Paris Review remained theoretically “apolitical.” But Whitney shows that the CIA’s cultural Cold War helped to shape its content just the same.
One of The Paris Review’s editors, Nelson Aldrich Jr., discovered that a government agency had purchased 460 copies of one issue and taken out ten subscriptions.
"As far as possible, this information should remain secret,” he cautioned his colleagues. The CCF effectively subsidized many little magazines simply by being a large and regular purchaser.
But its influence didn’t end there. The Paris Review is famous for its in-depth interviews with authors; the CCF paid to syndicate those interviews in its own suite of magazines. This it would only do, of course, if the interview subject was prominent and didn’t conflict with Cold War imperatives.
The CCF, Whitney shows, paid higher fees for pieces with elements of anti-Soviet propaganda, like the magazine’s interview with the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak. The CCF also steered The Paris Review toward interview subjects it wanted for its own magazines.
George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review for more than 50 years, revealed in private letters that he knew about the CCF’s connections to the CIA before they were made public. This fits with reporting by Richard Cummings in The American Conservative that Plimpton was an “agent of influence” for the CIA.
Through such relationships, the CIA wielded undue influence on the literary landscape. Whitney makes a compelling case, for instance, that the CIA reinforced the literary prestige of white men in American letters. If other nations believed that race relations in America were poor, the agency feared, it would damage our ability to lead the “free” world.
So the CIA sponsored African American voices only if their critique of U.S. society wasn’t too sweeping. And even writers it did support, like Richard Wright, found that the CIA was spying on them at the same time.
"I lift my hand to fight communism,” Wright wrote, “and I find that the hand of the Western world is sticking knives into my back.”
Ex-Communist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, attended some CCF events; he was the only black writer featured in The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction” series until the 1980s.
The evidence that investigative journalists like Whitney and Saunders have amassed should leave no doubt that the so-called “free market of ideas,” which the CIA claimed to be protecting, was distorted and undermined by the agency’s own activities.
The CIA’s cultural apparatus gave intellectuals a way to advance professionally, as long as they rejected radicalism and embraced the necessity of U.S. power in the Cold War. The CIA did not create those opinions, but it amplified them and helped give its warriors the sense of being engaged in a world-historic struggle.
Still, Whitney and other critics of the CIA too often aim to portray the agency and those who worked with it as a single entity acting with a unified purpose. The reality was much messier. Even the term “finks” has an unexpected history.
Whitney picks up the word “finks” from a letter from the novelist and editor Keith Botsford to the sociologist Daniel Bell, both associates of the CCF. For years, Botsford had been trying to convince the CCF to retire Cuadernos, an anticommunist magazine it ran in Latin America.
“It was a fink magazine,” he wrote to Bell, meaning that it drew from reactionary thinkers and produced poor quality work. (Jorge Ibargüengoitia, the Mexican satirist, once joked that Cuadernos was so bad that it must have been invented by communists to discredit their own opposition.)
Michael Josselson, the CIA’s principal agent for the CCF, fought Botsford’s plan to spike the magazine. But Josselson’s deputy - who swore to Botsford that he wasn’t CIA, when of course he was - backed Botsford. Botsford thought that he’d been played by the CIA’s “finks,” embodied by Josselson. But the “CIA” was on both sides of the debate.
Weaponizing culture, it turned out, was a tricky business. Even Cuadernos criticized the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. The magazine the CCF founded after Cuadernos’s demise in 1965, Mundo Nuevo, criticized the war in Vietnam.
Though the magazines still had strategic purposes, the straightforward defense of U.S. intervention was not among them. It is difficult, in fact, to say just who the “finks” are in all of this. If the test of finkdom is collaboration with state spies, then the CIA’s Communist opponents were finks, too.
Whitney sounds a powerful warning about the dangerous interaction between the national security state and the work of writers and journalists. But the precise experience of the cultural Cold War is unlikely to be repeated. A global ideological conflict, cast in civilizational terms, made the work of intellectuals worth subsidizing.
Today’s intellectuals are no longer needed as chits in a great power conflict, and our nostalgia for the Cold War generation’s prestige seems increasingly misplaced: An era of heroic thinkers now looks instead like a grubby assortment of operatives, writers who appeared to challenge the establishment without actually being dangerous to it. Jason Epstein was right.
The CIA created conditions that subverted the essential task of an intellectual: to cast a critical eye on orthodoxy and received wisdom.
Today the state maintains its capacity to influence political thinking, but the frontiers have shifted. Freedom is now defended less in little magazines than on social media. In 2014, the U.S. Agency for International Development was caught nurturing a Cuban version of Twitter - a logical extension of the CIA’s work in the ’50s and ’60s.
And as Edward Snowden’s revelations demonstrate, the promotion of freedom through open communications remains uncomfortably intertwined with the potential for surveillance.
What’s more, the vehicles we employ for personal speech are not only subject to electronic censorship and propagandistic manipulation by governments: They are also corporate properties.
While social media can facilitate the circulation of ideas and the defense of free thought, they also depend on profit-chasing and maximizing saleable engagement. In such a highly mediated and monitored system, the line between participation and unwitting collaboration can be difficult to discern.
Cold War intellectuals didn’t always realize the function they performed as “finks,” as accessories to power in systems they would have preferred not to validate.
Today the specific configuration of state interference may have changed, but we remain subject to forces that shape our opinions and the boundaries of our thinking in ways we cannot see clearly. How will we recognize it in ourselves if we, too, are finks?
Interview With Douglas Valentine: The CIA As Organized Crime
Douglas Valentine, author of the definitive book on the CIA's terror operations in Vietnam (The Phoenix Program), and the recently released title: THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World.
Douglas had unprecedented access to CIA officers while writing his book on Phoenix, and since then, he has been one of their most vocal critics. He names names, and doesn't pull any punches when it comes to exposing the criminal network otherwise known as the Central Intelligence Agency.
The FBI’s Conspiracy Theory Of A Trump / Putin Collusion Has No Clothes + CNN Downplays ISIS-Style Parliament Attack As “Firearms Incident” March 24 2017 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / Infowars / Various
Unable to provide an ounce of evidence that a Trump/Putin conspiracy stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton, the corrupt US “intelligence” agencies are shifting their focus to social media and to Internet sites such as Alex Jones and Breitbart.
Little doubt the FBI investigation will trickle down to Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Zero Hedge, the Ron Paul Institute, Nomi Prins, Naked Capitalism, Lew Rockwell, Global Research, antiwar.com, and to others on the PropOrNot, Harvard Library, and Le Monde lists, such as top Reagan administration officials David Stockman and myself.
It is extraordinary that the FBI is so desperate to protect the budget of the military/security complex that it brings such embarrassment to itself. Who in the future will believe any FBI report or anything a FBI official says?
Those behind this “investigation” understand that it is so ridiculous that they must give it gravity and credibility. They selected two reporters, Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, in the McClatchy News Washington Bureau, who fit Udo Ulfkotte’s definition of “bought journalists.”
Hiding behind anonymous sources - “two people familiar with the inquiry” and “sources who spoke on condition of anonymity” - the presstitutes fell in with the attack on independent media, reporting that one former US intelligence official said: “This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence.”
Wow! A totally ridiculous “investigation” is one of the most important in history. The implication is that the Russians are operating through scores or hundreds of independent media sites to control how Americans vote.
There was once a time in America when people were skeptical of anonymous sources. It was widely understood that anyone could tell a reporter anything and that a reporter could claim an anonymous source whether or not the source existed.
Perhaps it was the Watergate “investigation” by the Washington Post that gave anonymity credibility. The Post’s reports made it sound like any sources ratting on Nixon’s perfidy was at risk of their lives, and the subtle emphasis on risk gave anonymity credibility.
The real story under our noses is not a Trump / Putin / independent media conspiracy to steal the presidential election.
The real story is the totally obvious collusion between the Hillary forces, the US print and TV media (with the partial exception of Fox News), and the CIA and FBI to steal the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders, the presidential election from Donald Trump, and to delegitimize Trump’s election.
The theft of the nomination from Sanders is precisely what the leaked Podesta emails show. The totally one-sided presstitute support for Hillary and full-scale assault on Trump clearly show the presstitutes participation in the collusion.
FBI Director Comey’s statement the day before the presidential election that the FBI had once again cleared Hillary of criminal charges sent the Dow up 371 points and set the stage for a Hillary election victory.
Why are not any of these hard facts in the news?
Why, instead, do the presstitutes and “intelligence” agencies report nothing but fake news, supported by anonymous “sources”? Why is a false reality being constructed, and the hard facts ignored?
Note another extremely strange feature of our strange time. Elements of the liberal / progressive/left portray President Trump as a member of the One Percent operating for the One Percent against the people and filling his government up with generals and his budget with more military spending.
Why then is Trump under full-scale assault from the military / security complex? Why are they working to contradict, delegitimize and impeach their own agent?
Are we to conclude that America’s corrupt and disloyal “intelligence” agencies are a direct threat to democracy, that they are committed to overthrowing Trump’s presidency in a “color revolution,” that, unable to provide any evidence whatsoever for their conspiracy theory of a Trump / Putin collusion to steal the presidential election, the “intelligence” agencies have moved on to the discredit the independent Internet media that are in the way of the “intelligence” agencies’ control over explanations?
It is a hard fact that the Democrats, US “intelligence,” and the presstitutes are absolutely determined to control the explanations given to the American people and the wider world.
The Agents are out in force, and Neo is nowhere in sight.
The demonization of Russia and the extraordinary level of tension that the ignorant and foolish Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created with Russia are disconcerting, indeed, frightening to those, such as myself, Patrick Buchanan, and Stephen Cohen, who experienced the long decades of the Cold War.
We have never seen such highly provocative, entirely gratuitous behavior of one nuclear power toward another as the behavior of the US toward Russia over the past six presidential terms.
What the Cold Warriors of the time experienced was a gradual buildup of mutual trust that enabled Reagan and Gorbachev to end the Cold War and remove the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
In contrast, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the FBI, CIA, NSA, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, and the rest of the presstitutes, the right-wing Republicans, such as Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Ben Sasse, the Democratic Party, and the liberal / progressive / left have convinced Russia, in the words of Russia’s President Putin, that “we cannot trust the United States.”
This “achievement” of these idiots comprises the greatest crime humans have committed in their entire history. The atomic bombs with which the Americans gratuitously destroyed two Japanese cities are mere pop guns compared to the thermo-nuclear weapons of today.
Some of the crazed neoconservatives erroneously believe that Russia is not sufficiently well-armed to respond to US aggression, but the fact of the matter is that Russia’s strategic weapons are superior and more powerful than those of the US.
How can it be anything other than a death wish for European governments to be egging on conflict with Russia, for women marching not against war but against Trump for wanting to reduce tensions with Russia, for US “intelligence” to be totally committed to orchestrating a “Russian threat” that all but guarantees thermo-nuclear war?
One would think that people would be marching in favor of reduced tensions with Russia and demanding that Trump deliver on this promise, not that they would be out opposing Trump. What is the importance of Identity Politics compared to nuclear war?
How can Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Europeans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Japanese contain their outrage against the governments that are putting the life of the planet at risk for nothing except the budget and power of the US military/security complex?
How can the left-wing be lost in Identity Politics while the life of the planet is being put at extreme risk?
Why did CounterPunch recently and suddenly abandon the working class and peace and take up the cause of the victim groups of Identity Politics - women, blacks, homosexuals, lesbians, transgendered, and Muslim refugees (see Eric Draitser CP, Vol. 24, No. 1), the cause of the EU and globalism
Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but CounterPunch’s collapse coincides with CP being put on and removed from the PropOrNot list of Russian agents / dupes. My columns, for years a welcome feature on CounterPunch, suddenly ceased to appear. We have had no explanation from CounterPunch why the site suddenly gave up on peace and bread.
One might think that the audacity of the lies from the FBI, CIA, NSA and their media whores would provoke a powerful response from the liberal/progressive / left and from European populations, but it hasn’t.
If Trump is eliminated, with Pence as VP and the list of appointees provided by the Intercept, the US government will pass into the hands of the military / security complex for the remainder of its existence.
Is Trump now focused on protecting himself instead of protecting all of us from a deadly conflict with Russia? If so, this is the achievement of the US “intelligence” services, the Democratic Party, right-wing Republicans, the presstitute media, and the liberal/progressive / left. If anyone remains to write the history of the Great Incineration, the identity of those responsible is completely clear.
Comment: Calm down PKR, you're not in the loop, but - the truth shall prevail.
CNN Downplays ISIS-Style Parliament Attack As “Firearms Incident”
Network ignores news reports from UK media. Reports are circulating that the attacker was an Islamist who acted alone.
CNN downplayed the ISIS-style Parliament attack as a “firearms incident” despite UK media reporting it as a combined knife and car attack.
Related: London 3/22 False Flag Attack Bores to Death The network published an article with the headline “UK police investigate ‘firearms incident’ near parliament” around 11:30AM EST.
"London’s Metropolitan Police said on Twitter they were called at approximately 2:40 pm to reports of an incident near Westminster Bridge and that it was being treated as a firearms incident,” CNN said.
“TV images have emerged of a car crashed into a fence outside the Parliament building.”
CNN did admit a police officer was stabbed in the “firearms incident,” but the article was light on details.
In comparison, both the Sun and the Daily Mail said a knifeman was shot outside the UK Parliament right after he mowed down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, an attack which copies the methods used by jihadis during recent terror attacks.
And the Drudge Report had the following main headline as the CNN piece was going up:
"We heard a loud bang, lots of shouting and men running around. Someone rushed through, attacked a policeman,” a witness told The Sun. “He appeared to be carrying a knife or a gun. We then heard gunfire, five or six rounds.”
“The man approaching one of the police officers with a knife.”
As of this writing, police have not identified the suspect, although reports circulating on social media suggest the suspect was Middle Eastern.
Additionally, the two methods of the attack – a knife and a vehicle – mimick recent terror attacks in the West. In November, a Somali refugee attacked at least nine people with a knife at Ohio State University.
"A high-ranking faculty member who spoke to NBC 4 Columbus said that one of his colleagues was in Watts Hall at the time and was slashed in the leg with a machete,” reported the Daily Mail on Nov. 28.
“…The attack then got out of the car and started stabbing and slashing victims, a witness said.”
More recently, in Germany, one person was killed and three were injured by a knife-welding jihadi who shouted “Allahu Akbar” at a train station near Munich.
A similar attack happened on a train between Würzburg and Treuchtlingen.
"A German official described the footage of the teenage suspect in the German train stabbings as a ‘classical farewell video’ of a suicide attacker that indicates he was inspired by ISIS,” CNN reported.
“Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the 17-year-old also left a goodbye letter saying he prayed that he could take revenge on all infidels.”
And let’s not forget the lorry attacks in Berlin and Nice, France, in which dozens of people were mowed down by jihadi drivers encouraged by ISIS to use trucks to kill “infidels.”
The Parliament is located in London, which has attracted so many Muslim migrants over the past several years that the city is now called “Londonistan.”
Few any longer believe the “mainstream media,” that is, the presstitutes. This has put them into a panic as the presstitutes lose their value to the ruling elite if the presstitutes cannot control the explanations in order to justify the self-serving agendas of the ruling elite.
To fight back against the alternative media that does tell the truth, a secret group, PropOrNot, as well hidden as an offshore money-laundering operation, published a list of 200 websites accused of being “Russian agents/dupes.”
PropOrNot’s effort to discredit truth-tellers was hurt by the site’s anonymity.
Consequently, the next list appeared on the website of the Harvard University library, where it is attributed to a Melissa Zimdars of whom no one has ever previously heard. The websites on the list are also on the PropOrNot list, but those of us on Zimbars’ list are no longer “Russian agents/dupes,” merely purveyors of “fake news.”
None of my readers agree that I provide fake news. Indeed, when I tried to retire, my readers demanded that I continue providing them with reliable information as they understand that the presstitue media consists of lies.
Paul Craig Roberts
Now I hear from bloggers in France that the French newspaper Le Monde has posted a list of conspiratorial news sites, and, yes, French sites that translate and post my columns in the French language are on the list.
It appears that the campaign against truth is being extended to the entirety of the American Empire.
Just as the Washington Post and the Harvard Library made themselves look ridiculous and had to put some distance between themselves and the lists that they publicized, Le Monde will also.
Not only was I a columnist for leading French newspapers, such as Liberation (Paris) in the late 1980s and for Le Figaro (Paris) in the early to mid-1990s, but also I was awarded the French Legion of Honor by the President of France in 1987.
The honor was personally presented to me at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., by the French Minister of Economics and Finance, and later Prime Minister, Edourad Balladur, at a grand party at which top level Reagan Administration officials attended bearing a letter from the President of the United States congratulating France for recognizing my contributions.
That Le Monde would post such a list proves the truth of Udo Ulfkotte’s statement in his well known book that there is no significant journalist anywhere in Europe that is not on the CIA payroll.
I have wondered if the PropOrNor list was a creation of the presstitute media, such as CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, in order to protect their monopoly over explanations, or whether it was a creation of the CIA in an effort to protect the presstitutes who serve the CIA by controlling the explanations that gullible and ignorant people receive.
I suspect that the list is a creation of the CIA or the Department of State. It is a desperate act by those who have lost credibility to keep control over explanations.
The world of lies that comprises life in the Western world and hides reality from the people has destroyed all justification for the West’s long hegemony over humanity.
Today the West, corrupt, violent, greedy beyond all measure, evil beyond Satan, is a collection of populations comfortable with the mass murder of millions of Muslims in many countries. When evil can go without challenge, what hope does humanity have?
The Harvard Library website, perhaps in response to criticism, has now identified Melissa Zimdars as an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College. The library distances itself from the list by declaring it to be “an informal list.”
The library still has a link to Zimdars’ list of fake news websites, but the link opens to something else. Stephen Lendman provided a copy of Zimdar’s list on Global Research
Notice that WikiLeaks is on Zimdar’s list, which shows Zimdar’s absurdity. WikiLeaks posts no commentary or news, only vetted documents. Here is Zimdars’ list:
21st Century Wire
Activist Post
Antiwar.com
Before Its News.com
Black Agenda Report
Boiling Frogs Post
Common Dreams
Consortium News
Corbett Report
Countercurrents
CounterPunch
David Stockman Contracorner
Fort Russ
Freedoms Phoenix
Global Research
The Greanville Post
Information Clearing House
Intellihub
Intrepid Report
Lew Rockwell
Market Oracle
Mint Press News
Moon of Alabama
Naked Capitalism
Natural News
Nomi Prins
Off-Guardian
Paul Craig Roberts
Pravda.ru
Rense
Rinf
Ron Paul Institute
Ruptly TV
Russia-Insider
Sgt Report
ShadowStats
Shift Frequency
SJLendman.blogspot.com – my alma mater (Harvard) recommends avoiding my writing; new articles posted daily; featuring truth-telling on major issues
Solari
Sott.net
South Front
Sputnik News
Strategic Culture.org
The Anti-Media
The Duran
The Intercept
The People’s Voice
The Saker
The Sleuth Journal
Third World Traveler
Voltairenet
What Really Happened
Who What Why
WikiLeaks
Zero Hedge
NSA Documents Prove Surveillance Of Donald Trump & His Family + Documents Show Obama Surveiled Entire Trump Family For 8 Years March 22 2017 | From: Infowars / Various
Project Dragnet gave countless government employees private data on Trump.
Alex Jones breaks down information provided exclusively to Infowars from law enforcement sources that shows NSA surveillance of Donald Trump, his family, his employees and countless others under “Project Dragnet.”
Documents Show Obama Surveiled Entire Trump Family For 8 Years
Bombshell discovery shows targets of NSA's "Project Dragnet."
Infowars.com have obtained credible information from law enforcement sources regarding individual records of U.S. citizens under National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance in the years 2004 through 2010 – a database that suggests both Donald J. Trump and Alex Jones were under illegal, unauthorized government monitoring during those years.
Michael Zullo, formerly the commander and chief investigator of the Cold Case Posse (CCP), a special investigative group created in 2006 in the office of Joseph M. Arpaio, formerly the sheriff in Maricopa County, an Arizona State Certified Law Enforcement Agency, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, provided sections of the database to Infowars.com.
The electronic surveillance database, provided to Zullo by a whistleblower in 2013, was apparently created by the NSA as part of the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional Project Dragnet electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens, first revealed by news reports published in 2005, as further documented by the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
New NSA Whistleblower Goes Public About Trump Surveillance
This video gives you everything you need to know about how Donald Trump was surveilled by Barack Obama.
Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo have identified dozens of entries at various addresses, including both Trump Tower in New York City and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, under which Donald Trump was apparently under NSA electronic surveillance from 2004, during President George W. Bush’s term of office, through 2009, the first year of President Obama’s presidency.
Electronic surveillance of Donald Trump was listed in the database for the following companies, locations, and dates:
Trump International
1 Central Park, NYC, NY
2008
Trump World Tower
845 United Nations Plaza, NYC, NY
No Date
Trump Tower SAL
108 Central Park, NYC, NY
2007
Trump Palace Co
200 E. 69th Street A, NYC, NY
2008
Trump Entertainment
725 Fifth Ave. FL, NYC, NY
2007
Trump Organization
725 Fifth Ave. BSM, NYC, NY
2009
Trump Palace
725 Fifth Ave., NYC, NY
2004
Mar-a-Lago Club
1100 S. Ocean BL, Palm Beach, FL
2006
Trump International
401 N. Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL
2008
Trump International
3505 Summit BLV, West Palm Beach, FL
2004
Flights INC
P.O. Box 196, Hamilton MA
2004
Trump International
1 Central Park, NYC, NY
2008
Trump Hotels
Huron Ave., Atlantic City, NJ
No Date
Trump National
339 Pine Rd, Briarcliff, NY
No Date
Trump Plaza & C
2500 Pacific Ave, Atlantic City, NJ
2008
Trump Palace Co.
200 E. 69th St., NYC, NY
2008
Seven Springs
66 Oregon Rd, Mount Kisco, NY
2006-2008
While attempts have been made to deny such domestic surveillance, reports from the New York Times in 2014 showed the Central Intelligence Agency had done just that by spying on a senate panel investigating the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation.”
In a 2016 article from The Guardian entitled, “‘A constitutional crisis’: the CIA turns on the Senate,” it is likewise noted just how drastic and widespread the CIA’s domestic surveillance operation was.
As revealed from the Dragnet database, not only was Trump himself surveilled but so were numerous employees of his located at Trump Tower.
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson recently joined the Alex Jones show to discuss how intelligence sources have stated that such surveillance of Trump during the presidential election in fact took place.
Censored CIA Insider: My Sources Say Trump Was Surveilled By Deep State
Former CIA agent Larry Johnson confirms the accusations made in Trumps 'Obama wiretapping tweets' and backs up the claims with evidence.
Here is a partial list of the Trump employees that show up in the Project Dragnet database:
Patricia Hernandez, a Manager for the Trump Organization, was under NSA electronic surveillance at Trump Parc, Central Park South, in New York City, at phone 212-586-xxxx, date: 9/16/2008.
Mike van der Goes, a Golf Pro at Oceans Trails Golf Course in Palos Verdes, who was promoted to be general manager when Trump bought the course from the bank in 2005 and renamed it Trump National. Mike van der Goes was under surveillance at Trump National, 1 Ocean TRL, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, at phone: 310-265-xxxx, no date.
Carolyn Kepcher, a frequent guest on NBC’s television program “The Apprentice,” who was under NSA electronic surveillance when she was General Manager at the Trump National Golf Course in Briarcliff, New York, in Westchester County north of New York City, at 339 Pine Rd., in Briarcliff, New York, at phone 914-944-xxxx, date: 9/7/206.
Joe Traci, a Real Estate Property Manager at Trump New World Property Management, at 438 W. 69th Street, New York City, phone 212-769-xxxx, date: 11/12/2008; and at 5 12th Street, New York City, phone: 212-586-xxxx, no date.
Roger Socio, a Senior Project Manager, Trump Organization, Trump Tower, 725 Fifth Avenue, New York City, phone: 212-715-xxxx, 2/23/2009.
Bill Fichter, Residents Manager, Trump Organization, Trump Palace, 200 E. 69th Street, New York City, phone: 212-879-xxxx, date: 2/24/2009.
Florin Bogosel, Trump Park Avenue, 502 Park Avenue, New York City, phone: 212-223-xxxx, no date.
Grace Dunne, Trump Park Residence, 3770 Barger Street, Shrub Oak, New York, phone: 914-245-xxxx, date 1/26/2006.
Greg Bradley, Vice President, Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation, 9028 Van Wyck, East Richmond Hill, New York, phone: 718-291-xxxx, no date.
All these employees appear to have been under NSA phone surveillance, plus various of them under financial surveillance as well. The Project Dragnet database suggests Trump was under surveillance not only for phone conversations, but also for financial information, including most likely bank account transactions, credit card transactions, and tax filings.
Both federal and state law enforcement have had access to the Project Dragnet database, allowing widespread use for methods such as parallel construction. The practice, outlined in the 2013 Reuters article, “U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans,” reveals the breadth of information that trickles down to law enforcement from high-level intelligence agencies.
Also listed as under NSA surveillance in the period 2004-2010 was Trump’s former wife, Ivanka Trump at House of Ivanka, 10 East 64th Street, New York City.
The Project Dragnet database also indicates that the NSA was conducting electronic surveillance on an extensive list of Trump employees in the years 2004-2010 – the only years for which Sheriff Arpaio had data.
Alex Jones is listed as being under electronic surveillance for phone records, as well as under surveillance for financial records, in 2006. The address listed for Alex Jones in the NSA Project Dragnet database was correct for his residence at that time. So too, Alex Jones confirmed the phone number listed was also correct.
Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo have validated through law enforcement channels the validity of the name, address, and telephone numbers for the dates that appear in the Project Dragnet database.
Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo are prepared to share relevant information with appropriate federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, as well as the Department of Justice, Homeland Security Department, the White House, and members of Congress the Project Dragnet Database in whole, or in part, as it pertains to NSA electronic surveillance of Donald J. Trump and his various employee.
Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo also show up in the database, listed as being under both phone and financial surveillance.
Zullo explained that he and Arpaio came in contact with the information from Operation Dragnet during an unrelated investigation that began in October 2013 and ended January 2015.
A whistleblower by the name of Dennis Montgomery brought forward information that Montgomery alleges was collected while he was employed as a subcontractor for the NSA, working on various surveillance projects.
Court documents do verify Montgomery was contracted by the NSA, in part to develop computer breaching software that has been utilized in government mass surveillance operations targeting American citizens without legal justification.
While Montgomery’s credibility has been called into question, Zullo maintains that the amount of information provided by Montgomery related to Operation Dragnet was extraordinarily voluminous and that Montgomery had shared information with investigators in 2013 that is only now being revealed by media outlets.
David Rockefeller Dead?
Mainstream news sources are reporting the death of David Rockefeller. While possible, it is more likely that he has gone underground. The heat is coming on the Cabal so strongly now that it's just too dangerous to be out in the public arena. Even at age 101, the Cabal have tricks to prop up these old fossils, or put them on ice.
President Trump's Lawyers Plan A White House Legal Attack On Federal Agency Power + Trump Is Challenging The Whole CIA-Media Nexus & JFK Researchers: Trump At Risk For Assassination March 21 2017 | From: Time / JonRappoport / Infowars / Various
White House counsel Don McGahn has assembled a team of elite lawyers with the stated goal of leading Trump Administration efforts to roll back regulatory powers across the U.S. government.
The plan of attack, run from the second floor of the West Wing, is designed to take apart what Trump advisor Stephen Bannon has called "the Administrative State," the collection of federal agencies that exists to carry out laws passed by Congress and authorities granted to the President.
Trump aides argue that these bureaucracies have become an independent federal power sources that sometimes works against the intent of the U.S. Congress and U.S. Constitution.
"Article I is the Congress, Article II is the President. Article III are the courts. And then there's this administrative state, combining all three,” McGahn told TIME in an exclusive interview.
“They make the law, they enforce the law, and then they decide who violates the law, destroying the constitutional separation of powers that was designed to protect individual liberty."
One White House aide described the group of lawyers hired by McGahn as a conservative answer to "Nader's Raiders," a small group of liberal activists organized by Ralph Nader in the 1960s and 1970s, who successfully fought for greater federal regulation of consumer goods like automobiles and food.
McGahn said he had specifically chosen his staff because of their expertise in working inside federal law.
"They understand the regulatory agencies, several are appellate lawyers who have spent their careers fighting regulatory and government overreach, or worked on Capitol Hill conducting oversight,” McGahn said in an interview with TIME.
“A number of people in the office actually have sued the government over regulatory over reach, and have won."
The group, which reports to McGahn, includes Greg Katsas, a deputy White House counsel, who ran the Department of Justice’s Civil Division during the Bush administration and challenged the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court while in private practice.
Stacy Cline Amin, an associate counsel, was the Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Associate Counsel John Bash has argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court, clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a hero of conservatives in the fight against the regulatory system.
Tim shares about his experience at Trump's inauguration and reveals why we should all be paranoid about our privacy being compromised by the government and other major companies.
Senior Associate Counsel James Burnham successfully argued a challenge to former President Barack Obama’s recess appointees to the National Labor Relations Board. Senior Associate Counsel Uttam Dhillon and Associate Counsel Daniel Epstein are both veterans of several Capitol Hill oversight roles.
McGahn is no stranger to the struggle himself. A former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and an advocate against some campaign financial legislation, he led the charge in trying to rein in federal regulation of campaigns.
"When I hear 'deregulation,' all that means is returning the power to decide policy back to those elected by the people, whether it is the House, the Senate, or the President,” McGahn said.
One priority, McGahn said, will be working toward "giving full life" to the 2012 Supreme Court case Sackett vs. EPA. That case expanded the ability of Americans to challenge regulatory orders in court.
McGahn said the administration would work to support efforts by citizens to object to regulations that affect them.
"We are looking for these various bureaucracies to be a little more fair," McGahn said.
"Too often agencies impose penalties without basic due process. Before imposing a penalty or negative ruling, those accused should get an opportunity to be heard. It is fundamentally unfair to do otherwise."
The larger goal of rolling back agency regulatory powers also played a role in the selection of Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch, who has proposed abandoning the so-called Chevron doctrine - which grants federal agencies the first crack at interpreting laws that apply to them before the courts.
Emerging from a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, the doctrine stands to be a key flashpoint in his upcoming confirmation hearings. In his responses to a questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gorsuch listed his concurrence in the case, Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, as the first case when asked for significant decisions he had worked on.
In that decision, Gorsuch said the Chevron doctrine;
"Was more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.
My opinion noted that the Administrative Procedure Act vests the courts with the power and duty to interpret statutory provisions, that deferring to an agency's interpretation may be in tension with Congress's statutory directive, and that this practice may raise due process (fair notice) and separation of powers concerns,” Gorsuch wrote to the committee.
In some ways the deregulatory stance of the Trump administration is simply conventional conservative practice, directed more by Republican Party thinking than the president’s beliefs. Trump has spoken only generally about his desire to dismantle “job-killing” regulations, but his team is nothing if not specific.
But the president's top strategist, Bannon, has elevated the issue in recent weeks, including during a recent address to conservative activists.
"The administrative state is the FEC, the FTC, the FCC, FERC, SEC all that alphabet,“ Bannon told TIME in an interview last week.
“All this stuff in environment or EEOC, just on and on and on, coupled with the bureaucracies that do it."
Trump’s first budget, set to be released this week, will include dramatic cuts to non-defense discretionary spending, including major regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency.
Already the administration has rolled back or delayed scores of Obama-era regulations. Two of the first four bills signed by the presidents rolled back a pair of controversial rules.
Presidential orders swiped away the red tape for the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. And the White House Counsel’s office and the Justice Department are reviewing pending litigation in regulatory cases to determine whether to reverse the government’s positions.
"It’s early but the efforts there have been serious first steps,” said Philip Wallach a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and an expert on the administrative state.
White House aides acknowledge the work may be messy, and argue Trump believes the shakeup is necessary to meet his economic growth targets.
"It'll be quite controversial, particularly when we get into things like the EPA,” Bannon told TIME.
“But the President believes very strongly you cannot unleash the real animal spirits of the American economy just in tax cuts."
The notion of the administrative state is nothing new. Ronald Reagan sought to rein it in during his eight years, but struggled to do more than just contain its growth.
But the fight against its growth became a crusade during the Obama years, particularly in conservative legal circles as they watched the former president relied on regulatory action to circumvent an obstructionist Congress.
President Trumps Weekly Address: March 19 2017
Trump has yet to nominate or fill hundreds of key posts across the government that will determine if he can bend the bureaucracy to his will. Trump has also delayed in making some selections for independent regulatory agencies.
"It’s very hard to overcome the bureaucratic inertia,” Wallach said. “It will take a lot of professionalism to do a lot of this regulatory work and a lot of effort to deal with the bureaucracy.”
The Trump team retorted: Ridiculous; reminds us of the CIA’s phony assessment of Saddam’s WMDs that led to the disastrous war against Iraq.
Then the CIA’s gloves came off. But there is more to it than that.
All along, Trump has been hammering the mainstream press, calling them biased, idiots, fake, etc. Certainly through his advisor, Steve Bannon, and quite probably through other sources, Trump knows about the CIA-major media connection.
This connection, of course, goes way back to the Mockingbird CIA operation of the early 1950s. Major news outlets have been infested with CIA operatives since that time.
When Trump goes after mainstream news, he’s also going after its shadow brother, the CIA; and vice versa. This is no accident. You can’t put a heavy dent in one without putting a heavy dent in the other.
Donald Trump on 9/11 TRUTH (Aired Sept.11, 2001)
As the mainstream press continues to stir the pot and attack Trump on every possible front, day after day, they strive to impart the impression that the escalating war between Trump and the CIA is a sign that the president’s administration is in a condition of severe imbalance, heading toward the edge of the cliff.
Two points about that: the press is trying to protect its shadow brother, the CIA; and the reason a war between a president and the CIA hasn’t broken out since JFK and the Bay of Pigs is, simply, no president has dared to challenge the CIA openly.
Or to put it another way, every president since Kennedy SHOULD have gone to war with the CIA, but no president did.
Trump, so far, is carrying out his version of a war.
He may stop, he may make peace, he may turn away, he may decide the consequences are too steep, but so far he’s doing, in this respect, what he should be doing, because the CIA has believed, for a long, long time that it is the president, it runs the country, it decides the important issues, it fronts for mega-corporate incursions into foreign nations, it decides foreign policy, it calculates when a regime should be overthrown, it decides how to foment wars that will end up funneling huge chunks of cash to the military-industrial complex…
People with attention spans of less than six seconds think rooting out corruption in high places can be done with the stroke of a pen and an executive order. No. Afraid not.
Digging out, exposing, and getting rid of the rot and corruption inside the CIA is on the order of turning around an oil tanker in a small lake.
That rot and crime wasn’t built to its present level overnight. It has been built since 1948.
The people who constructed it (with Allen Dulles right up there at the head of the line) assumed they could stage a coup. A national coup. They could essentially take over the country. And to a large extent, they did. JFK’s assassination removed a potential obstruction early in the game.
Then, nothing. Until Trump.
Maybe he’ll throw up his hands and forget about going after the CIA. Maybe he’ll focus on other parts of his agenda. Maybe he’ll prove to be completely ineffective and unwilling, as regards the Agency.
But he has sounded an alarm, just as he sounded an alarm about Globalism, the so-called “free trade” treaties, and the brutal theft of jobs in America by those Rockefeller forces who want to torpedo economies, as a step toward exercising greater international control over the lives of billions of people.
The CIA and major media in this country are in lock-step. They feed each other. They produce a picture of reality that is entirely shallow and false. They want compliance, obedience, and silence. They want to make black white and white black. They want to fulfill Orwell’s 1984 prediction.
The best of these little “journalists” are leeches and adoring cowards. They cling to the higher-ups who run the show.
The worst of them are psychologically and spiritually mongrelized sociopaths, for whom sadism is the only way of life. Like their CIA brothers, they believe (or did believe until recently) that no one could remove their entitlements.
Steve Bannon knows - and I’m sure he’s told Trump - that a war against the media is the best way to go right now. On many fronts, the media are the funnels for presenting inside out lies, from the CIA, to the American people.
In other words, if the head of the snake is too hard to cut off at the moment, go for other parts of the body.
JFK Researchers: Trump At Risk For Assassination
President Trump is at more risk of assassination from the Deep State than any president since President John Kennedy.
That was the consensus warning issued by a meeting of top JFK assassination researchers held at the National Press Club on Thursday.
“I’m really worried, whether you like Donald Trump or not – I’m concerned about where this is going,” Lawrence Schnapf, a New York attorney and co-chair of the Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA), the group sponsoring the press conference and seminar.
“The Deep State that conspired to assassinate JFK is still in place today,” Schnapf stressed.
“CAPA is going to do everything we can to get the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to make public all the JFK assassination records, even if we have to take legal action.”
“But Donald Trump must understand the threat to his life from enemies within the Deep State is real.”
CAPA sponsored the meeting to urge President Trump to sign an executive order demanding the National Archives make public all remaining JFK assassination documents that are currently scheduled for release on Oct. 26, in final compliance with the JFK Records Act of 1992 as implemented by the Assassinations Record Review Board (AARB).
On Oct. 26, NARA is expected to release some 3,600 documents still held secret, nearly 54 years since JFK was assassinated in Dallas, TX, on Nov. 22, 1963.
In addition, NARA possesses approximately 40,000 that remain heavily-redacted – documents that CAPA is urging President Trump to insist also must be released on Oct. 26, without redactions, to allow the American public to read these documents in complete form, as they were originally written.
An index of the 3,600 still secret documents released by NARA suggests the documents still kept secret by the CIA largely involve the deep and complicated ties the CIA had to Lee Harvey Oswald, the “lone-gun assassin” identified by the Warren Commission.
"We may never know how many documents the CIA destroyed or if the 3,600 documents NARA is planning to release are all secret JFK assassination documents that may exist deep buried within the CIA,” explained Andrew Kreig, J.D., a Justice Integrity Project editor and CAPA member who organized the conference.
“If President Trump would lend his authority to the release of all JFK documents in a not-redacted fashion, the American public would finally get a chance to see how the Warren Commission lied and covered up the extent to which we now understand Lee Harvey Oswald worked as a field operative, for the Deep State that continues today to menace President Trump.”
Famed forensic pathologist and medical school professor Cyril H. Wecht, J.D., M.D., chaired the conference and gave a graphic demonstration why he considered the Warren Commission’s “single bullet theory” nonsense, demonstrating his points by arranging two members of the audience to adjust their chairs to sit as President Kennedy and Governor John Connelly sat in the presidential limousine that fatal day in Dallas.
A diagram showing the ridiculous and physically impossible 'official' claim that one bullet took the above trajectory through two people
Also attending was noted JFK expert James H. Lesar, J.D., the president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) headquarted in Washington, D.C.
“What after more than 50 years can be so important to national security that the federal government would want to keep secret from the American public about the assassination of our president on Nov. 22, 1963,” Lesar asked.
He expressed his continuing concern that one provision of the JFK Records Act gives federal agencies the right to request continued postponement of JFK records after 2017, if release would result in “identifiable harm” that outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
Governments: The Enemy Of Freedom & Globalists Interviewed: They Admitted They Controlled The Government March 18 2017 | From: Sott / JonRappoport / Various
My friends, we're being played for fools. On paper, we may be technically free.
In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
"Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter.
Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government ... doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety... It's interested in its own power.
That's the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible."
- George Carlin
We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.
Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do - our very lives - depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle.
And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
This holds true whether you're talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders' belief that this would be "a government of the people, by the people and for the people."
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
The unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.
In other words, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws by voicing our opinions in public or on our clothing or before a legislative body - no matter how misogynistic, hateful, prejudiced, intolerant, misguided or politically incorrect they might be - then we do not have free speech.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that's a whole other ballgame.
Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors are conspiring to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good.
For instance, the protest laws being introduced across the country - in 18 states so far - are supposedly in the name of "public safety and limiting economic damage."
Don't fall for it.
No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.
In Arizona, police would be permitted to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that at some point becomes violent.
In Minnesota, protesters would be forced to pay for the cost of having police on hand to "police" demonstrations.
Oregon lawmakers want to "require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot."
A proposed North Dakota law would give drivers the green light to "accidentally" run over protesters who are blocking a public roadway. Florida and Tennessee are entertaining similar laws.
Pushing back against what it refers to as "economic terrorism," Washington wants to increase penalties for protesters who block access to highways and railways.
Anticipating protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota wants to apply the governor's emergency response authority to potentially destructive protests, create new trespassing penalties and make it a crime to obstruct highways.
In Iowa, protesters who block highways with speeds posted above 55 mph could spend five years in prison, plus a fine of up to $7,500. Obstruct traffic in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence.
A North Carolina law would make it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.
Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use "any means necessary" to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. That legislation has since been amended to merely empower police to issue fines for such behavior.
Georgia is proposing harsh penalties and mandatory sentencing laws for those who obstruct public passages or throw bodily fluids on "public safety officers."
Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an "unlawful assembly" after "having been lawfully warned to disperse" with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.
Missouri wants to make it illegal for anyone participating in an "unlawful assembly" to intentionally conceal "his or her identity by the means of a robe, mask, or other disguise."
Colorado wants to lock up protesters for up to 18 months who obstruct or tamper with oil and gas equipment and charge them with up to $100,000 in fines.
Oklahoma wants to create a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure. The penalties would range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you're part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.
Michigan hopes to make it easier for courts to shut down "mass picketing" demonstrations and fine protesters who block entrances to businesses, private residences or roadways up to $1,000 a day. That fine jumps to $10,000 a day for unions or other organizing groups.
Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways or trespassing on private property - because such laws are already on the books - then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?
What's really going on here?
No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn't care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.
How many times will we keep falling for the same tricks?
Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and fear and comply with the government's dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government's transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.
Remember, the Patriot Act didn't make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry - private and governmental - whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.
Placing TSA agents in our nation's airports didn't make us safer.
It simply subjected Americans to invasive groping, ogling and bodily searches by government agents.
So, too, these protest laws are not about protecting the economy or private property or public roads. Rather, they are intended to muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority.
These laws are the shot across the bow.
They're intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you're either a patriot who marches in lockstep with the government's dictates or you're a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.
Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is deliberately stirring the pot, creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.
When there is no steam valve - when there is no one to hear what the people have to say, because government representatives have removed themselves so far from their constituents - then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
Then again, perhaps that was the government's plan all along.
As John F. Kennedy warned in March 1962, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The government is making violent revolution inevitable.
How do you lock down a nation?
You sow discontent and fear among the populace. You terrorize the people into believing that radicalized foreigners are preparing to invade.
You teach them to be non-thinkers who passively accept whatever is told them, whether it's delivered by way of the corporate media or a government handler. You brainwash them into believing that everything the government does is for their good and anyone who opposes the government is an enemy.
You acclimate them to a state of martial law, carried out by soldiers disguised as police officers but bearing the weapons of war. You polarize them so that they can never unite and stand united against the government.
Click on the image above to see more detail in a new window
You create a climate in which silence is golden and those who speak up are shouted down. You spread propaganda and lies. You package the police state in the rhetoric of politicians.
And then, when and if the people finally wake up to the fact that the government is not and has never been their friend, when it's too late for peaceful protests and violence is all that remains to them as a recourse against tyranny, you use all of the tools you've been so carefully amassing - the criminal databases and surveillance and identification systems and private prisons and protest laws - and you shut them down for good.
The NSA will continue to collect electronic files on everything we do. More and more Americans are going to face jail time for offenses that prior generations did not concern themselves with.
The government - at all levels - could crack down on virtually anyone at any time.
Martin Luther King saw it coming: both the "spontaneous explosion of anger by various citizen groups" and the ensuing crackdown by the government.
"Police, national guard and other armed bodies are feverously preparing for repression," King wrote shortly before he was assassinated.
"They can be curbed not by unorganized resort to force...but only by a massive wave of militant nonviolence...
It also may be the instrument of our national salvation."
Militant nonviolent resistance.
"A nationwide nonviolent movement is very important," King wrote. "We know from past experience that Congress and the President won't do anything until you develop a movement around which people of goodwill can find a way to put pressure on them...
This means making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough, so that people of goodwill, the churches, laborers, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves begin to put pressure on congressmen to the point that they can no longer elude our demands.
It must be militant, massive nonviolence," King emphasized.
In other words, besides marches and protests, there would have to be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience forces the government to expend energy in many directions, especially if it is nonviolent, organized and is conducted on a massive scale.
This is, as King knew, the only way to move the beast. It is the way to effect change without resorting to violence. And it is exactly what these protest laws are attempting to discourage
We are coming to a crossroads. Either we gather together now and attempt to restore freedom or all will be lost.
As King cautioned, "everywhere, 'time is winding up,' in the words of one of our spirituals, corruption in the land, people take your stand; time is winding up."
First of all, David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission was born in 1973, in part because the Globalist plan to ensure “free trade” (no tariffs paid by predatory mega-corporations) had run into a glitch.
That glitch was President Richard Nixon. He began laying tariffs on certain goods imported into the US, in order to level the playing field and protect American companies. Nixon, a substantial crook in other respects, went off-script in this case and actually started a movement to reject the Globalist vision.
After Nixon’s ouster from the White House, Gerald Ford became president, and he chose David’s brother, Nelson Rockefeller as his vice-president. It was a sign Globalism and free trade were back on track.
But David Rockefeller and his sidekick, Brzezinski, wanted more. They wanted a man in the White House whom they’d created from scratch.
That man was a peanut farmer no one had ever heard of: Jimmy Carter.
Through their media connections, David and Brzezinski vaulted Carter into the spotlight. He won the Democratic nomination (1976), spread a syrupy message of love and coming together after the Watergate debacle, and soon he was ensconced in the Oval Office.
Flash forward to 1978, the second year of Carter’s presidency. An interview took place.
It’s a close-up snap shot of a remarkable moment. It’s a through-the-looking-glass secret - in the form of a conversation between a reporter, Jeremiah Novak, and two Trilateral Commission members, Karl Kaiser and Richard Cooper.
The interview concerned the issue of who exactly, during President Carter’s administration, was formulating and controlling US economic and political policy.
The careless and off-hand attitude of Trilateralists Kaiser and Cooper is astonishing. It’s as if they’re saying, “What we’re revealing is already out in the open, it’s too late to do anything about it, why are you so worked up, we’ve already won…”
"NOVAK (the reporter): Is it true that a private [Trilateral committee] led by Henry Owen of the US and made up of [Trilateral] representatives of the US, UK, West Germany, Japan, France and the EEC is coordinating the economic and political policies of the Trilateral countries [which would include the US]?
COOPER: Yes, they have met three times.
NOVAK: Yet, in your recent paper you state that this committee should remain informal because to formalize ‘this function might well prove offensive to some of the Trilateral and other countries which do not take part.’ Who are you afraid of?
KAISER: Many countries in Europe would resent the dominant role that West Germany plays at these [Trilateral] meetings.
COOPER: Many people still live in a world of separate nations [!], and they would resent such coordination [of policy].
NOVAK: But this [Trilateral] committee is essential to your whole policy. How can you keep it a secret or fail to try to get popular support [for its decisions on how Trilateral member nations will conduct their economic and political policies]?
COOPER: Well, I guess it’s the press’ job to publicize it.
NOVAK: Yes, but why doesn’t President Carter come out with it and tell the American people that [US] economic and political power is being coordinated by a [Trilateral] committee made up of Henry Owen and six others? After all, if [US] policy is being made on a multinational level, the people should know.
COOPER: President Carter and Secretary of State Vance have constantly alluded to this in their speeches.
KAISER: It just hasn’t become an issue.
Source: “Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management,” ed. by Holly Sklar, 1980. South End Press, Boston. Pages 192-3.
Of course, although Kaiser and Cooper claimed everything being manipulated by the Trilateral Commission committee was already out in the open, it wasn’t.
Their interview slipped under the mainstream media radar, which is to say, it was ignored and buried. It didn’t become a scandal on the level of, say, Watergate, although its essence was far larger than Watergate.
US economic and political policy run by a committee of the Trilateral Commission - the Commission had been created in 1973 as an “informal discussion group” by David Rockefeller and his sidekick, Brzezinski, who would become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.
Shortly after Carter won the presidential election, his aide, Hamilton Jordan, said that if after the inauguration, Cy Vance and Brzezinski came on board as secretary of state and national security adviser, “We have lost. And I will quit.”
Lost - because both men were powerful members of the Trilateral Commission and their appointment to key positions would signal a surrender of White House control to the Commission.
Vance and Brzezinski were appointed secretary of state and national security adviser, as Jordan feared. But he didn’t quit. He became Carter’s chief of staff.
In the run-up to his inauguration after the 2008 presidential election, Obama was tutored by the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Four years before birthing the Commission with his boss of bosses, David Rockefeller, Brzezinski wrote:
"[The] nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation state.”
Goodbye, separate nations.
Any doubt on the question of Trialteral goals is answered by David Rockefeller himself, in his Memoirs (2002):
"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Patrick Wood, author of Trilaterals Over Washington and Technocracy Rising, points out there are only 87 members of the Trilateral Commission who live in America.
Obama appointed eleven of them to posts in his administration. For example:
Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary;
James Jones, National Security Advisor;
Paul Volker, Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee;
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence.
Here is the payoff. The US Trade Representative (appointed by Obama in 2013), who was responsible for negotiating the Globalist TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) treaty with 11 other nations, was Michael Froman, a former member of the Trilateral Commission.
Don’t let the word “former” fool you. Commission members resign when they take positions in the Executive Branch of government. And when they serve in vital positions, such as US Trade Representative, they aren’t there by accident. They’re operatives with a specific agenda.
Flash forward one more time. Trump, who squashed the Globalist TPP treaty as soon as he was inaugurated, has been busy making staff appointments. Patrick Wood writes (2/6/17):
“According to a White House press release, the first member of the Trilateral Commission has entered the Trump administration as the Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs, where he will sit on the National Security Council:
Kenneth I. Juster will serve as Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs. He will coordinate the Administration’s international economic policy and integrate it with national security and foreign policy. He will also be the President’s representative and lead U.S. negotiator (“Sherpa”) for the annual G-7, G-20, and APEC Summits.”
Juster’s duties will take him into the heart of high-level negotiations with foreign governments on economic policy.
Keep your eye on Mr. Juster. Will he take actions in line with Trump’s avowed anti-Globalist stance? Or will Juster work as one more covert Trilateral operative in the center of American decision-making?
If the answer is “covert operative,” does Trump know this? Does he condone what Mr. Juster will do? Or is this a case of secret infiltration, on behalf the most powerful Globalist group in the world, the Trilateral Commission?
Sean Spicer: We Are Confident President Will Be Vindicated On Wiretapping Allegations + MSNBC's "Tax Records" Non-Story: Trump Made $150MM, Paid 25% Tax Rate, More Than Romney, Bernie March 17 2017 | From: TheGatewayPundit / Zerohedge / Infowars
White House spokesman today told reporters that President Trump expects to be vindicated on his wiretapping allegations.
President Trump tweeted about the Obama administration spying on Trump Tower during the election.
Spicer told reporters Trump is extremely confident the facts are on his side.
Sean Spicer:"I think he’s extremely confident. We said this before. I will let the House and Senate and DOJ report this, but as I’ve commented in the past, I think there’s significant reporting about surveillance techniques that have existed throughout the 2016 election.
I’ll leave it to them to issue their report but I think he feels very confident that we will ultimately come to this. It will vindicate him."
Intel Sources: Obama Used British Spies To Tap Trump
Didn't want his fingerprints on surveillance.
Three separate intelligence sources believe that former President Obama veered ‘outside the chain of command’ and employed British surveillance agents to conduct surveillance on Donald Trump’s team prior to the election, according to a legal analyst.
Judge Andrew Napolitano revealed on ‘Fox & Friends’ this morning that the sources spilled the details to him as the controversial case continues to dominate headlines.
“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command,” Napolitano said.
“He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice.”
"He used GCHQ.” Napolitano explained.
“What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database.” The Judge explained.
Napolitano noted that this was done to secure plausible deniability. In other words, even if the Obama administration did spy on Trump, there may never be a way to prove it.
“So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.” Napolitano added.
Napolitano also noted that the sources have informed him that the individual who personally ordered the surveillance, who remains unnamed “[r]esigned three days after Trump was inaugurated.”
The case continues to evolve after the Justice Department requested additional time Monday to gather and present evidence of the alleged surveillance to the House Intelligence Committee. It was granted until March 20th to comply with committee’s request to stump up evidence.
MSNBC's "Tax Records" Non-Story: Trump Made $150MM, Paid 25% Tax Rate, More Than Romney, Bernie
While Rachel Maddow drones on with the coherence of Janet Yellen, losing thousands of viewers by the minute, the MSNBC anchor was promptly scooped not only by the White House which revealed her "secret" one hour in advance, but also by the Daily Beast which reported that its contributor David Cay Johnston had obtained the first two pages of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return, allegedly receiving them in the mail, and posted his "analysts" on his website, DCReport.org.
According to the documents, Trump and his wife Melania paid $38 million in total income tax, consisting of $5.3 million in regular federal income tax, and an additional $31 million of “alternative minimum tax,” or AMT.
The White House statement confirmed the finding:
“Before being elected President, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world with a responsibility to his company, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the White House said in a statement.
“That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million dollars even after taking into account large scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150 million dollars, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes and this illegally published return proves just that.”
As the Beast notes, 2005 was the year that Trump, then a newly minted reality star, made his last big score as a real-life real estate developer, when he sold two properties, one on Manhattan’s west side and one in San Francisco, to Hong Kong investors, accounting for the lion’s share of his income that year.
“It is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns,” the White House statement concluded. “The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the President will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.”
But the real story here is that there is no story: what MSNBC confirmed is that Trump made more money than some of his critics said he made in the period in question, and more importantly, that he paid a generous effective income tax rate, well above the 14.1% rate paid by Mitt Romney, and even higher than the 13.5% federal tax rate paid by Bernie Sanders in 2014.
Sadly for Maddow, with this attempt at a "blockbuster" story which has quickly backfired, she may well have killed the great distraction that was the trope of Trump's tax returns, and which the rest of the "resistance" press hammered on every now and then.
Speaking at Washington & Lee University, Michael Hayden admitted he didn't care about the Constitution, the Patriot Act or any other law - he had a "direct order from the President".
Insider Confirms CIA Controls CNN + Mainstream Media Exposed Its Own Cannibalism And More March 17 2017 | From: VicturusLibertas / Geopolitics / Infowars/ Various
Our CNN insider had been out of touch with us for several days. We were starting to wonder what was going on, but in our latest communication, our CNN insider did confirm our biggest fears. The CIA is indeed attempting, with all their might, to control the message to the masses!
They are embedded with all of the mainstream media – CNN, NBC, Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, probably Fox, as well.
These are the exact words of our source, “It’s been really bad. We have CIA folks here all the time now.”
Our insider says the CIA are mainly talking to Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Zucker. Our source says the CIA tells them what to say, and everyone is “so mad at this Vault 7 Assange person.”
According to our source, Vault 7 “let the cat out of the bag."
Our source also says Tapper is scared of these guys. “He nods his head like a obedient dog, and then yells at us, and curses Assange,” according to our source.
Another interestingtidbit our source mentioned was that Tapper was talking about “droning” Assange.
Our source claims someone in the production crew for Don Lemon was heard saying that the “personalities” here may be exposed by Wikileaks, because the CIA has a very close relationship with all the “glamour folks” here. The CIA runs the machine that creates the message. Folks, its no wonder Jake Tapper is scared. He is about to be exposed as a talking sock puppet for the clandestine services department of the Shadow Government.
News is dead. Let that sink in for a bit… The MSM News is DOA……What we have now is State Propaganda, and an Orwellian version of news. Not only can (and do) the CIA control the message, they can listen in via the delivery system.
The CIA is constitutionally forbidden to spy on Americans. They came out yesterday and swore on their pinkie finger they were not spying on the citizens.
24 hours later, Assange stated that there are 22,000 cases of CIA domestic spying just in the first 3-4 data dumps.
Marine Le Pen Smacks Down Reporter: ‘No One Trusts the Media’
French populist highlights incredible disconnect from reality of establishment press
A fascinating exchange in which French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen informs a reporter that no one trusts the media highlights how incredibly disconnected from reality the establishment press really is.
The reporter tells Le Pen her advice that people “turn away from the traditional media, (and) go and find news on the Internet” is “dangerous”.
Le Pen looks bemused, asking, “why?”
The reporter responds by stating; “On the Internet, you can find conspiracy theories, all types of things, it’s not necessarily verified information.”
“Don’t you think that the traditional media have conspiracy theories?” replied Le Pen, adding, “I’ve read a ton of things about Russia intervening in the presidential campaign and other things like that – I mean there is at least as much fake news in the traditional media as on the Internet!”
The reporter then accuses her of ‘inciting’ people to “find information” on the Internet “about things that weren’t verified”.
“It could never be worse than what you guys are saying or what you write in the traditional newspapers,” responds Le Pen.
The reporter then accuses the National Front leader of acting like Trump in trying to undermine the media as a campaign tool.
“Madame, French people have no confidence in the media whatsoever, are you aware of that, or not?” asks Le Pen.
The exchange once again highlights how the mainstream media is completely out of touch with reality.
These people still think that they have absolute credibility when in reality trust in the establishment press is lower than at any time in recent history.
The latest polls show that Le Pen has pulled ahead of establishment candidate Emmanuel Macron with 26.5% of the vote compared with 25% for Macron.
The first round of the French presidential election takes place on April 23, with the second round to follow on May 7.
Le Pen is almost certain to pass the first stage, although she is widely expected to be defeated in the second round.
Then again, those making this forecast are the same people who got it spectacularly wrong on Brexit and Trump – and the same people who think the mainstream media is still trustworthy.
Mainstream Media Exposed Its Own Cannibalism And More
In their panic to save the mainstream narrative, that all is well in their fantasy world, CNN broadcasted a documentary on ritual cannibalism to contain Wikileaks’ anti-CIA nuclear bomb called Vault7.
How a mainstream broadcast entity could have gone so low as to tackle a subject that has no relevance to the issues of the day and age is beyond comprehension.
For decades, the CNN and allied Rothschild media networks, have been cannibalizing the brains of the Western population and that of the rest of the world, with half-truths and blatant fabrication of narratives.
CNN Is Eating Your Brain Literally and Figuratively: The Reza Aslan Saga
These propaganda outfits have enjoyed the “presumption of regularity” in all their activities, i.e. where people assumes anything that is aired through their elaborately decorated studios to be true. Otherwise, the story must be “fake news.”
The glaring divide among the US electorate is one sad example of the grave effects of a deliberate and systematic dumbing down of the Americans. Some are even willing to fight it out in favor of a candidate who has been living in at least two different realities.
Reza Aslan is showing ashes from a cremated victim spread all over his face. To put it bluntly, the entire Deep State is now in an uncomfortable deep shit that’s been spread around their faces.
But everything they have said all this time is now being exposed as one big lie. For the CNN to project that cannibalism is Hinduism would cost them more than just their own reputation, if they still have it.
The less than a 100-strong Aghori tribe does not represent Hinduism, and is in fact being frowned upon by the latter. A billion-strong Hindus are now moving to boycott CNN for good.
Aslan tastes what was presented to him as cooked human brain tissue. A member of the sect threatened to cut his head off at one point if he asked too many questions
CNN’s Reza Aslan (pictured, right) has been heavily criticized for eating human brain in an episode of his new series called Believer
Work all your life for a headline like this?
It seems that CNN’s Reza Aslan is also a victim of their own cannibalistic enterprise. He could not decipher anymore, which material could add more to the enlightenment of the masses from feeding the appetite of the beasts.
We are told to give the guy a break, as he was through scouring the CNN headquarter for brains, but there was none. Seriously though, we think that there’s something more to the stagecraft, as always.
While journalist, part-time cannibal, Aslan may be doing his own brand of journalism, the Cannibal News Network itself has a more elaborate agenda.
We suspect that aside from diverting the world’s attention from the fallout of Wikileaks’ Vault7 revelations, and sowing divisiveness among Immigrant America, the Deep State conglomerate is also trying to normalize Satanic rituals that’s been implicating the highest ranking public officials of the West, i.e. PedoGate and PizzaGate scandals, in the last few months.
“According to our DHS Insider,
“There is a concerted attack on Sessions due to his zeroing in on the pedophilia scandal called Pedogate.
John McCain and Lindsay Graham are secretly working with Chuck Schumer and members of the clandestine services of both US and Israel to remove Sessions, or at least stop the Pedophilia investigation in its tracks.”
As you probably know, what is now becoming known as “Pedogate” represents not only hundreds of millions of dollars in hush money, but also untold political influence-peddling.
Rince Pribus is also a key player in covering up the scandal, as is Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, John Podesta, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and of course Barack Obama.
When Netanyahu met with Trump, Netanyahu attempted to convince Trump the pedophilia scandal was “a false premise”. Netanyahu is also scared of exposure. Trump became suspicious and has become increasingly aware of how big the pedophile scandal is.
Trump has told several in his inner circle that [quoted by our insider] “the swamp is much more polluted than I expected“. He has spoken to Chris Christie extensively about the Pedophilia ring(s) and it has been determined that branches of the ring spread as far as Asia, and are rooted in the deepest corners of both the US and the UK political system.
Trump was overheard telling his daughter [quoted by our source] “This town is pedophile central…” and “This makes me sick“."
Cannibalism is at the center of Luciferian rituals.
Basically, pedophiles are running the Western world according to a few courageous Western investigative journalists themselves.
Are they now moving in for the kill, that all religions are bad, except Catholicism, so that they could finally establish the One World Religion?
If that’s the case, then Pope Bergoglio’s recent statement that he’s now contemplating of allowing married men to join the Pedophile, Inc. should come as no surprise.
"Pope Francis has indicated that he’s open to the possibility of ordaining married men as a means of dealing with priest shortages facing remote Catholic communities, according to an interview published in Die Zeit.
The pope stressed that removing the celibacy rule was not the answer to the Catholic Church’s priest shortage but expressed a willingness to examine whether married men of proven faith, known as “viri probati,” could be ordained.
“We must consider if viri probati is a possibility. Then we must determine what tasks they can perform, for example, in remote communities,” AP quoted the pontiff as saying.
As far as we could discern it, modern day religions are not just confined to the organized church, but also in many divisive “movements” that they’ve sponsored.
We could not spot any difference in the LGBT movement, or the climate change pseudo-environmentalists club anymore, etc., when compared to the old religions anymore. They all seem to serve the same purpose.
Indeed, they are.
Geopolitically, a kinetic quarrel between Muslim Iran and Hindu India could be useful now to weaken the BRICS Alliance, and sabotage the Eurasian “One Belt One Road” project of China. CNN’s Reza Aslan is identified as an Iranian-born religious scholar.
When will they finally wake up to the reality that they’ve lost the war?
What Data Are We Keeping About You? | Rand Corporation & How Amazon.com Spies On Your Most Private Thoughts, Fetishes And Conversations March 15 2017 | From: Geopolitics / NaturalNews / Various
The Khazarian Mafia admits that they are collecting data about you and your activities over cyberspace, and they are having a hard time dealing which ones are more relevant than others.
They are very worried that they might be forming inaccurate assessments which would lead to the curtailment of your freedoms.
We should help them sort it out. What Data Is the Government Keeping About You?
The recent revolution in the collection and use of big data is transforming the way people learn, communicate, shop, find mates, consume news, and perform countless other tasks. Both governments and businesses are amassing a wealth of data on citizens, a trend that is expected to continue as technology advances.
However, without a reliable mechanism to ensure that the data is accurate and up-to-date, risks abound. This is particularly concerning in the criminal justice system, where poor quality or outdated data have the potential to affect individual freedoms and employability.
Historically, the only truly accessible criminal justice system data were arrest records or trial verdicts. However, advances in information technology mean that law enforcement agencies are building datasets that can go much further.
Notes from officers’ or detectives’ interactions with citizens - for example, when they interview them related to incidents where they might be a suspect, a victim, or a witness - are now often captured in computer systems rather than on paper, and therefore are kept longer and shared more widely than before.
Technologies such as cell site simulators and license plate readers make it possible for law enforcement to collect data on where large numbers of mobile phones or cars have been.
Social media and online communication data provide a picture of individuals’ social and familial interactions. When accurate inferences can be drawn from such data to deter, prevent, and prosecute crime, society benefits.
However, when such data is inaccurate, outdated, or shared with other agencies or private third parties, it can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Such errors have already had an impact. In a recent piece in the Washington Post, a reporter recounted how his search for an apartment was almost derailed when a series of criminal convictions erroneously showed up on a report from a private company to his potential landlord.
In that case, the reporter knew how to figure out what had happened and resolved the situation, but other citizens - most lacking the skills of an investigative reporter - probably wouldn’t. And if decisions based on inaccurate data are made “behind the scenes” - by an algorithm that assesses how much risk a person poses, or their likelihood of committing future crimes - the citizen may never know what happened.
Accuracy can mean more than data just being objectively correct, it may require enough context about how data was collected so that people - or algorithms - understand what it means.
For example, if a law-abiding person is stopped by the police while heading to the store with a relative or friend who happens to be a gang member, and that encounter is recorded in a police database, the person might be wrongly flagged as connected to the gang.
In a database that connects citizens to criminal gangs, how much context should have to be retained so a future investigator would know that it was just based on one trip to the store?
How long should that flag be retained? How will it be translated when transmitted to other jurisdictions? If this person continues to be law abiding, but is stopped for a traffic infraction 10 years later in another jurisdiction, what will that officer see?
Will the traffic stop be handled differently as a result? Should it be? To maintain fair treatment, when should the system be programmed to “forget” that this individual went to the store with a gang member? Five years? Ten? Twenty?
During a recent workshop we held with court and criminal justice system experts, the increasing volume of data was identified as a high priority problem.
Data is increasingly being used to make the justice system work better, but as the amount and the sources of that data proliferate, mechanisms should be developed to ensure errors are not being tolerated.
Unlike in other spheres where data drive consequential decisions about citizens - notably in the credit reporting and scoring system - the criminal justice system has no legally required processes that enable citizens to review data about themselves and challenge inaccuracies.
And the broad sharing of justice system data both within and outside the legal system, makes it difficult to correct errors even when they are discovered.
There are no simple solutions for these problems. Our workshop participants wrestled with these issues and identified areas for additional research. One idea was the use of a data “expiration date” - a date at which data must be deleted based on its quality with more unsure or error prone data forgotten faster than verified information.
The U.S. criminal justice system is currently integrating and adapting to the myriad data and analytic technologies that are transforming the rest of society.
However, in this race to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the system, the rights of citizens to be treated fairly, based on accurate and timely data and information, should be made a high priority. A failure to do so would be corrosive to the faith and trust Americans place in the system.
Dulani Woods is a quantitative analyst and Brian A. Jackson is a senior physical scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. This commentary originally appeared on Inside Sources on February 28, 2017.
What this RAND Corp. article really wants to hammer down beside telling us the inconvenient truth is to show that they are above everything else, and they can do whatever they want. Don’t do anything stupid against them on the net, or you will suffer the consequences.
Worse than RFID Implant! A Tech Device Under Production for Mass Release
How Amazon.com Spies On Your Most Private Thoughts, Fetishes And Conversations
Amazon.com isn’t merely a massive retailer; it’s also a dangerous spy machine that collects detailed profiles of your most private thoughts, fetishes and conversations.
Every Amazon.com device you use is actually a surveillance collection interface that’s translating your thoughts, beliefs and conversations into a “psychological profile” database at Amazon.com servers. For example:
Amazon ECHO devices constantly listen to your most private conversations and process your voice by uploading segments of audio to Amazon.com servers. Law enforcement agencies have already sought to use audio recordings from ECHO devices to incriminate individuals for words they uttered in their own private homes. Owning an Amazon ECHO device is like planting a law enforcement bug in your own home… that YOU pay for!
Kindle devices record what books and authors you read, including which text passages you highlight in those books. This can be used to expand a psychological profile of your beliefs, preferences and even fetishes.
Amazon FIRE devices can hear your voice and upload recordings to Amazon servers. They also track and record all your preferences in films, television shows, viewing times and title ratings.
The Amazon.com website builds a psychological profile of your interests and demographics based on your purchase history. This is used to promote “suggested” products while a psychological profile of you is accumulated on Amazon’s servers.
Every Amazon service is collecting data about your likes and dislikes, including Amazon MUSIC. It is the combination of all these data sets that is astoundingly dangerous because it “profiles” your mind without your consent.
New NRA Commercial Destroys Liberal New York Times & Google Censorship Of Natural News March 13 2017 | From: TheGatewayPundit / NaturalNews / Various
“Truth Doesn’t Matter to The New York Times”
The NRA quickly created a new commercial in response to the commercial that the New York Times ran during the Academy Awards where the Times claims “The truth is more important now than ever.”
The NRA responded by blasting the Times with a commerical that says “The trut is that the truth didn’t matter to The New York Times then as much as now -because as long as liberals were “progressing,” the truth was depressing.
Google Censorship Of Natural News
After six days of being blacklisted by Google, the NaturalNews.com website has been restored to Google’s search results. The action by Google follows the largest and most vocal backlash against Google’s de-listing of any website in the history of the company, and it has sparked many new discussions and debates about search engines, censorship and free speech.
All of us at Natural News - as well as our many millions of fans - are grateful for Google’s decision to restore the NaturalNews.com website, but we are also deeply troubled by the unjustified blacklisting of Natural News and what it means for free speech across the ‘net.
For the record, there was never any allegation or evidence that Natural News had intentionally violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.
While Google said we were being flagged for a so-called “sneaky mobile redirect” on a very small number of pages in a subdomain (blogs.naturalnews.com) which were created by outside bloggers, Google went to the extraordinary step of banning the entire NaturalNews.com root domain and all its subdomains - a step that would never have been applied to CNN, Huffington Post or other popular news websites.
In fact, a Natural News investigation showed that violations identified involving websites like HuffPo, Forbes and CNN did not result in the same kind of blacklisting that was applied to Natural News.
Furthermore, while Google did make an effort to provide us with one URL that they said flagged this mobile redirect, to date there hasn’t been a single SEO expert or engineer who could reproduce the supposed redirect issue.
Even more disturbingly, when we went to the Google product webmaster forum to ask for help identifying this issue, we were insulted, mocked and accused of lying by Google’s supporters who behaved like a pack of jackals rather than search engine professionals.
No Evidence, No Charges But You’re “Guilty” Because They Say You Are
Through this entire process, Natural News was constantly being called a liar for failing to remove something that Google flatly refused to identify. In essence, we were charged with a “crime” by Google, yet Google refused to provide any details of the crime, nor any evidence of the crime, nor any tool whereby we could reproduce Google’s claimed “redirect.”
To call this process extremely frustrating for webmasters is an understatement. I continue to believe that Natural News was targeted by Google due to the content of our speech which supports President Trump… and that the “sneaky mobile redirects” issue was merely the justification used by Google to de-list the entire NaturalNews.com website.
Google no doubt disagrees with this assessment and says it was just a technical issue, yet we are not aware of any other situation in which a minor technical issue on a subdomain resulted in Google blacklisting the entire ROOT domain of a major publisher, with 140,000+ pages of quality content.
Natural News appears to be the only website of its size that has ever been subjected to this extreme censorship for such a minor technical issue on pages posted years ago by bloggers on a subdomain.
Also for the record, there is absolutely no evidence or even any accusation of Natural News deliberately engaging in any “black hat” SEO techniques, or malicious linking strategies, or any other tricks that might be used by unscrupulous internet spammers.
Natural News focuses on quality content and well-constructed titles, leaving the ranking algorithms up to Google.
While our content is obviously controversial - telling the truth is always a revolutionary act in an era of great deceit - it is of great interest to millions of readers and produced with the intention of helping humanity. See our list of 10 timeless principles that drive the Natural News mission.
The Power to Censor is the Power to Destroy
Because Google is such an integral part of the internet ecosystem, with its dominant influence determining website traffic, e-commerce product sales and online reputations, Google’s power to censor is the power to destroy.
At the flick of a switch, Google can destroy an entire family business… the business model of an online store… or the reputation of a truly good person.
There are many who argue at this very moment that Google is a private company and can therefore “do whatever it wants” without justifying anything. In arguing for this, they are supporting a totalitarian monopoly by a search engine that has the power to destroy without cause or justification.
Yet we live in a society where the entire media and popular culture was outraged when a bakery in Oregon said it would not bake a cake for a lesbian couple. The media uproar demanded the bakery be vilified for refusing to provide services to that customer, and it was later fined $135,000 by the state of Oregon for causing “emotional damage” to the plaintiffs.
Clearly, in that case, society said the bakery did not have the right to blacklist a lesbian couple, yet many of the same Leftists who decried the Oregon bakery are now saying Google has the right to blacklist Natural News.
Is that only allowable in their minds because I’m not gay? What if Natural News had been run by a transgender? The outrage against Google across the LGBT community if Google had blacklisted a popular LGBT news website would be deafening.
Indeed, I believe Google proceeded with blacklisting Natural News precisely because I’m not gay, I’m not transgender and I’m not a liberal. We were discriminated against, I believe, because we are not part of the “protected” classes of citizens in the progressive worldview where Google operates.
Had Natural News been a pro-Clinton, “progressive” website, I believe a minor technical glitch on some subdomain blog pages from years ago would have been given a pass.
After all, the final decision to blacklist Google was a human decision - called a “Manual Action” by Google - which means someone at Google decided to penalize Natural News for something that was not flagged by any Google algorithm.
The Need to Regulate Google, Facebook, Twitter and Other Internet Giants
Given the monopoly position of Google in the marketplace, Google must be prevented from granting special protections to certain “progressive” websites (such as the Huffington Post) while targeting “conservative” websites for extreme punitive action.
(Natural News is not strictly conservative, but we do support President Trump. However, we are also pro-environmental protection and even announced a donation of lab services to Native American communities to test their water for possible contamination by oil pipeline leaks and spills.)
Specifically, a process must be put in place where Google is required to produce the evidence they claim to have against a website and provide at minimum three working days for webmasters to resolve the named issues.
Google has an obligation to tell websites why they are about to be blacklisted and provide a reasonable means of recourse so that webmasters can take steps to comply with Google’s ever-changing, mysterious “black box” rules.
Furthermore, Google must be required to apply its relevancy algorithms fairly, across all sites, without singling out certain publishers for special penalties decided by biased humans who simply disagree with the content of a particular site.
I believe that, given Google’s monopoly position of dominance over the internet ecosystem, it’s time for Congress to pass a law that would apply these bare minimum regulations to Google operations to prevent politically motivated censorship. Call it the “Online Speech Protection Act.”
It would not prevent Google from blacklisting websites that truly abuse dark hat SEO tactics, but it would require that Google provide advanced notice, produce the evidence against the site, and provide a reasonable means by which webmasters could resolve the issues in question, especially for those website that are obviously attempting to comply with Google’s rules (which even SEO experts admit are almost impossible to navigate).
How Google Enables Hat Speech Against the Very Websites it is Censoring
As Natural News was being censored by Google, we were also being assaulted and called liars by the same left-wing media that routinely attacks Donald Trump.
By censoring Natural News, Google empowered a massive wave of defamation articles that deliberately sought to exploit the absence of Natural News in the rankings to spread knowingly false lies and hatred about Natural News and myself in particular.
In essence, Google just enabled one of the most vile hate campaigns ever witnessed on the ‘net, all while denying Natural News any ability to defend itself against such hate-based smears and malicious lies.
It is the electronic equivalent of binding your hands, slapping duct tape over your mouth, and throwing you to the lions. All this from a company that once claimed to “do no evil.”
In effect, Google censored us, then allowed others to smear us, then hosted a webmaster forum which attacked us and called us liars, then refused to provide us with any evidence of wrongdoing, all while silencing our ability to defend ourselves in the public space.
There’s no question in my mind that none of this would have ever happened if Natural News had been a Clinton-supporting website.
There’s no question in my mind that Natural News was discriminated against because we were a convenient political target that could be silenced as part of an elaborate smear campaign to drag our reputation through the mud, scare away future visitors and harm our revenue-generating traffic as a form of economic sabotage.
The conclusion here is that Google has now become a weaponized search engine of censorship and hate, deployed by politically biased operators who are so filled with anger at Trump’s victory that they justify blacklisting entire website they don’t like.
Is there any doubt that some of these young, intolerant Leftists work inside Google right now, using their power of censorship to silence the websites they hate? How are we to trust Google to make sure the power to blacklist websites is not abused inside Google itself?
Alex Jones discusses how leftists are devolving into zombies as their minds are infected with identity and victimhood politics.
Sadly today, much of the political Left has become a hate group. As a hate group, they truly believe they alone have the unique right to censor others, to defame others, even to violently attack and murder others whose speech they don’t like. This is now evident everywhere throughout Leftist culture, including in Hollywood and the Oscars.
With Google clearly being run by Leftists, and Facebook run by Leftists, and most of the internet gatekeepers dominated by intolerant Leftists, the shocking realization is that none of us are safe from the hatred, intolerance and censorship of the techno-liberals who tell themselves “the ends justify the means” to silence Trump supporters and defame those who support Trump.
First They Came for Me… Will Google Come for You Next?
Truly, this is a sad era for America, a sad era for the internet and a sad realization of what Google has come to because Google has not taken any action to state they won’t repeat the same censorship again at any time, without notice.
What Google asserts right now, to all websites, is that we are all at the mercy of Google, the new “Ministry of Truth,” which can condemn you without explanation, silence you without producing a shred of evidence, and arrange for you to be slandered and defamed without recourse.
While Natural News had a large enough audience to initiate a widespread backlash of outrage against Google, the sad truth is that most websites are too small to mount any sort of effective defense against the Ministry of Google. When the small (but important) voices are silenced by Google for political reasons, who will speak for them?
Who will speak up for the minority voices that are all part of the diversity of public debate and dialogue in a free society? Google asserts that it has the right to blacklist any site at any time for any reason without explanation… and that it can all be decided by a human being at Google, a left-leaning organization that no doubt employs a large number of intolerant, biased Leftists who despise free speech while actively seeking to silence those with whom they disagree.
Is this really acceptable in a free society? Do website now have to calculate their odds of being de-listed by Google with every new article they publish that doesn’t celebrate the twisted narratives of the political Left?
What guarantees do any of us have that Google won’t target us on any given day, for whatever reason of their choosing, and silence us forever?
As currently run, Google is a danger to free expression and an enabler of hate speech. Its actions smack of the kind of totalitarian rule we’ve seen before throughout history under cruel, genocidal rulers like Mao and Stalin.
When speech is selectively suppressed by a monopolistic, politically-connected entity that sees itself as the sole arbiter of what speech is “allowable” in society, we are already on the path toward info-totalitarianism… and the outcome can only be less freedom and more human suffering, as history has proven again and again, without fail.
This must change. Google must be subjected to reasonable regulations that protect the rights of citizens to engage in free speech in a free society. We must not let Google march us down the path of totalitarianism and the silencing of dissent.
Let us hope that Congress will pursue reasonable regulations against Google, Facebook and Twitter that will rein in their monopolistic practices and discriminatory censorship that harms America and suppresses human freedom around the globe.
We’ve launched a new site to cover censorship on the internet. Visit Censorship.news to stay informed.
Troubles In Australia: PM-Of-The-Day Pushes Vaccination Agenda, Fascist Biometrics + More March 13 2017 | From: TheGuardian / ActivistPost / MSN
Malcolm Turnbull pushes for ban on unvaccinated children at childcare centres.
PM to take ‘no jab, no play’ policy that would also ban unvaccinated children from preschools to Coag meeting.
Unvaccinated children would be banned from childcare centres and preschools across the country under a push by the federal government.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has written to state and territory leaders in a move towards introducing nationally consistent laws to protect children across Australia. He says he will take the policy to the next Council of Australian Governments (Coag) meeting.
Under the proposal the immunisation rates of all preschools and daycare centres would be made publicly available to parents and the right to make a formal objection would also end.
In the letter to state and territory leaders he writes:
“At our next Coag meeting I propose we agree that all jurisdictions implement legislation that excludes children who are not vaccinated from attending childcare or preschool, unless they have a medical exemption.
Vaccination objection is not a valid exemption. We must give parents the confidence that their children will be safe when they attend childcare and preschool.
Parents must understand that if their child is not vaccinated they will be refused attendance or enrolment.”
Turnbull told News Corp: “If you don’t vaccinate your child you are not just putting their own life at risk but you are putting everyone else’s children at risk.”
The federal health minister, Greg Hunt, said the government’s “no jab, no pay” policy of withholding family payments to parents of unvaccinated children was being supplemented by an “equally tough” policy of “no jab, no play”.
“We want to work with all of the states and I’m very confident that they’ll come on board,” he told the Seven Network. “Ultimately it’s about protecting kids against horrendous illnesses that are agonising and potentially in some cases tragic.”
The senior Labor MP Mark Butler said the opposition was willing to sit down and talk constructively with the government on the issue.
“The AMA says that, next to clean water, this is probably the most important public health measure that a country can have,” Butler told ABC television. “We’ve said that we think there is also some need for consideration of a public advertising campaign at a national level, just to reinforce that public health message that the AMA is talking about.”
Hanson was criticised by the Australian Medical Association and others for giving the impression that vaccines were not safe.
She told the ABC’s Insiders program that successive governments had “blackmailed” people into having their children vaccinated because of the policy of withholding childcare fee rebates and welfare payments from parents who don’t have their children fully immunised.
Her comments were denounced by both the Coalition and Labor, with Hunt saying: “The clear and categorical advice from experts including the chief medical officer, based on decades of research and evidence, is that vaccinations save lives.”
Australia Aims To Be The First Country To Process Air Travelers Via Biometrics Nationwide
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced a plan that could make Australia the world’s first country to implement a nationwide “contactless” system for processing its air travelers.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has sought technology that would abolish incoming passenger cards, remove the need for most passengers to show their passports and replace manned desks with electronic stations and automatic triage.
Officials are looking to use existing databases coupled with iris scans, facial recognition and fingerprint scans as the final phase of a five-year project called “Seamless Traveller” that is slated for completion by 2020.
It’s all a part of the move toward a full-fledged Smart World where YOU become a digitally scanned device in a matrix of online and real-world activity.
Head of Australia’s border security, John Coyne, highlighted the rapid acceleration of biometric technology, as well as government access to the massive processing power of Big Data which he noted “is increasing exponentially.” Furthermore, he flatly stated that such access is global.
The innovation was possible because of the massive amount of passenger data – including ticket information, travel history and criminal records – sourced globally and analysed in the back room, Dr Coyne said. [emphasis added]
Similar to other “smart traveler” initiatives, the first appeal is made to convenience. Anyone familiar with increasingly long lines and intrusive human security checks might welcome the project’s vision to enable travelers to literally walk into an airport and out the other side without a single interference. While that might be the focus message to the consumer, Coyne reveals the true heart of the mission.
Dr Coyne said it was all about “selective permeability”, or using intelligence to determine in advance which types of passengers posed a risk – and getting everyone else through more efficiently.
“All of this is about risk,”he said. “I think in Australia we’re doing exceptionally well.”
Given the fact that biometric security itself has trickled down from use in war zones like Afghanistan to catalog potential terrorists, this would have to be the priority. Moreover, wherever these systems have popped up, abuses have been recorded.
Even in the “Land of the Free,” local police have been caught using biometrics without consent by harvesting information from unaccountable databases, which illustrates how easily purported border security measures can creep well beyond their stated intent.
As it turns out, the problem in the U.S. is much greater than that. The FBI has been actively trying to exempt from privacy protections a massive national biometrics database called the Next Generation Identification (NGI) System.
And this is only what we know about - in a country that has constitutional protections for its citizens.
As disparate biometrics systems from security to banking to travel and even to your home computer all begin to link up and cross communicate, globally, the possibility of widespread privacy violations increases exponentially.
For additional details about Australia’s plan for biometric processing for air travelers, please see the video below.
Australia To Replace Passports In Favour Of Biometric Scanning
Stay-At-Home Mums Are Under Attack, Yet Again. But Where Are The Dads?
Women who stay at home to raise children are a problem for Australia’s economy, according to a major new study.
A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) claims stay-at-home mums and women who work short part-time hours are creating “potentially large losses to the economy”.
Part-time workers and women with children are the “greatest untapped potential in the Australian labour force”, the study states. The authors say more “prime aged” women (25-54) could enter the workforce and further efforts are needed to encourage mothers with young children into work.
The idea is that paid work is “important for women’s personal well-being and perceptions of their overall quality of life’’, the study states. These are familiar motherhood battle lines, where women are told to choose a side in what’s presented as a black and white situation.
The Parenthood‘s Principal Campaign Manager, Nicole Lessio, says she’s angry that women are demonised for choices they’re sometimes “forced to make”.
"Stay-at-home mums should ignore the horrible headlines,” says Ms Lessio.
“As mums we’re either cold, ambitious and leaving our children to go to work or we’re a drain on the economy if we stay at home – we just can’t win."
“All mums should choose what is right for them in their circumstances but have the support and childcare options to make working choices easier.”
The daily accomplishments of brushing teeth, timing a nap, orchestrating siblings or negotiating a tantrum should not to be overlooked.
The selflessness of motherhood and caring for a child is completely under-rated as a purpose or vocation. Parenting doesn't match the maternity leave time span. It doesn't end when you are due back at work. It's also not something you can do later.
So what's the solution?
"Childcare accessibility and affordability is a huge challenge that disproportionately affects women returning to work, so more affordable childcare is needed," says Ms Lessio.
"But we also need to focus on creating more flexible and supportive workplaces so women and men can better balance work and home responsibilities," she added.
Obviously, mothers and families are as varied as the babies they bring into the world. Some want to stay at home, some don't. Where are the dads in this equation? Would longer paternity leave mean they could contribute at home more and balance the employment gap?
For mothers who want to return to work and are searching for a balanced work-life balance there are real challenges for finding child-friendly part-time roles.
It's offensive to think that women who are giving their all to raising our little people could be thought of as a drain to the economy. Life for me was messy after giving birth - not much went to plan. It is a new way of life, where a little boy is considered in the decisions I make.
The study highlights what we already know - the women who stay at home are a talented bunch of women and an incredible asset to Australia.
Women don't lose those their skills when they stay home - they re-apply them and work gruelling hours for their families.
Stay-at-home mothers are already doing the country's most undervalued job.
Yesterday’s Conspiracy Theory Is Today’s News + Spies Tell Lies, Spying Is Lying & Wikileaks Says Less Than 1% Of Vault 7 Released March 12 2017 | From: Infowars / JonRappoport / RT / Various
For those of us who pay attention to these issues and don’t get our “news” from the discredited mainstream corporate fake news syndicate, the Wikileaks Vault 7 revelations that the U.S. government can use our devices to watch us and listen to us is old, but real news.
Is there a Pulitzer Prize nomination forthcoming? An apology for mocking this bombshell of truth as a paranoid conspiracy theory? Of course not! As it becomes increasingly clear that yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s real news, the call to kill the messengers just gets more shrill and hysterical.
The attacks on free speech with high-tech censorship campaigns and old-fashioned hit pieces are massive and concerted.
The book burners are starting so many fires it’s impossible to stamp them all out. What are the horrible thought crimes committed by Infowars? Infowars has consistently exposed the lies and crimes of our corrupt and broken institutions. Infowars passionately and convincingly made the case that The Patriot Act literally reversed the gains to human liberty codified in The Bill of Rights.
Infowars dismantled the lies that were presented as the pretexts to the invasion of Iraq. (The same lies aggressively promoted by Hillary Clinton and The New York Times)
Infowars was interviewing NSA whistleblowers who were accurately describing how the U.S. government was illegally spying on its citizens and retaining our data, and how these whistleblowers were being persecuted by their own government for coming forward and refusing to break the law.
This was years before anyone heard of Edward Snowden.
Amazingly, there was very little interest in these bombshell allegations in the mainstream press.
It’s hard to believe now, but in those days, people who claimed the government was surveilling innocent citizens were dismissed as paranoid by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth at the NYT and CNN.
Infowars detailed a decade ago how police forces all over America were becoming militarized and predicted that this dangerous trend would lead to racially charged conflict on the streets of the nation. What kooks! Infowars has railed against; torture, needless wars, police brutality, government corruption, the two-party duopoly, the criminality of the banksters and the end of privacy.
Now the very same mainstream media hacks who promoted the lies that lead to war in Iraq and Syria and mindlessly regurgitate whichever talking point is uploaded onto their teleprompter are gleefully assassinating Infowars using edited tape and misleading hit-pieces.
While these discredited war cheerleaders lie about why our sons and daughters are sent to die, Infowars bravely exposes the fraudulent casus belli they traitorously and disgracefully promote.
While these corporate spokespeople work for the interests of the oil and drug companies and political forces that pay their salaries, Infowars risks everything to expose the crimes and scams of these same broken institutions.
Infowars has been consistently committed to the causes of non-intervention and freedom. It’s hard to quantify, but I know my career has suffered from my association with Infowars. Judging by social media posts, over 90 percent of my colleagues despise Infowarriors. Writing this piece will probably hurt my reputation among potential clients and not help me. I have heard Infowarriors called white-supremacists, racists, Neo-Nazis and worse.
These disgraceful, unsubstantiated smears and slanders have also been directed at yours truly and my friends and I don’t f-ing appreciate it! If I have to endure one more supercilious rant on social media consisting of regurgitated talking points I am going to throw up.
It’s interesting to me that the people calling Infowars paranoid and hysterical are the same people who post pieces claiming that Russia controls our country and that Trump is literally Hitler.
These are two of the most ridiculous and paranoid mass delusions in the history of conspiracy theories, yet the Hillary camp passionately embraces and defends these fantasies. Their hypocrisy is exposed on numerous fronts, but the fact that most of them voted for Mrs. Clinton automatically knocks them off their high-horses in my book.
In your defense, you probably were not aware of the extent of her corruption since the mainstream news sources you worship were colluding with the DNC and Clinton campaign to hide them from you while Infowars was exposing the truth.
I think Infowars has a done a great public service by exposing the deceptive, psychological methods used by the ruling elite to warp historical narratives, manipulate patriotism and manufacture consent.
By helping us to recognize and suspend our belief in propaganda and therefore our own complicity in it, Infowars is helping to create a public awareness to the tactics our enemies use to keep us divided, steal our rights and slaughter countless innocents all over the world.
I know it’s fun and easy to call us tin-foil-hat wearers, or whatever pejorative has been chosen for you today, but let’s be clear about whose dirty work you are doing.
Infowars is in direct competition with the mainstream media for revenue and the MSM want to control the information we are exposed to.
They are waging a concerted demonization campaign aimed at destroying one of the dominant platforms exposing the lies and crimes of their corporate and deep-state masters and many of you are helping them do it.
The MSM is an enemy of the truth and of the people. Do we have the will and power to destroy our enemy?
In recent articles, I’ve highlighted items from the latest WikiLeaks data-dump of CIA files. For example:
The CIA’s use of other nations’ hacking tools, in order to give the impression that, when the CIA hacks into secret areas, it looks like other nations did the hacking.
All this is SOP for the CIA and intelligence agencies around the world. Spies tell lies. A day without lying is a day without joy. Spies play chess.
"Well, when we leak THIS information to the press, they’ll emphasize the source of the leak (of course we know it’s a fake source we’ve chosen). But when we leak THAT information, the press will emphasize the content of the leak - which is what we want them to do in that case.”
Naïve people are shocked that the CIA could have fabricated the whole “Russia hacked the US election” story. But this is what the CIA does. This is another day at the office.
On the other hand, Russian intelligence could have hacked (influenced) the US election. And to put a further twist on it, Russia could have made that move, anticipating that US intelligence would discover it and go public with it. And then Russia would covertly launch a planned campaign to ridicule the CIA for claiming such an “absurdity.”
During the Cold War, several important KGB spies defected to the US. The CIA then proceeded to vet them, to find out whether they were genuine, or were sent here to seed the CIA with disinformation. As you can imagine, the whole business developed severe problems.
For example:
"All right, yes, the KGB sent me to America to confuse you. But now I’m telling you the truth. I’m giving you actual secrets. And I want to stay here. I don’t want to go home. If I go home, the KGB will vet me to see whether I actually gave you real secrets…”
CIA: “Maybe we can triple this Russian. He’s now on our side, we think. So we send him back, claiming we couldn’t get anything useful out of him. But now he’s ours. So we give him a bunch of lies to tell his bosses about us, the CIA…”
In the end, nobody on either side knows what’s going on. But they play the game anyway.
The CIA is a reality-creator and a reality-destroyer. They pick and choose what to do in each situation. But it would be folly to imagine Agency people always do brilliant work. They mis-estimate blowback. They fail to handle blowback.
They try to pick an outside scapegoat on whom to blame the blowback. They try to limit the blowback by defaming, discrediting, blackmailing, or killing people.
They rewrite history. They change sequences of events. They invent events that never happened. They blame people who don’t even exist. They present themselves as bumblers, to hide their more intelligent operations.
They hold forums designed to show their work as superficial information-gathering, as if they were little more than a think-tank. They pretend to cooperate with Congress, while they spy on Congress.
Meanwhile, the press pretends to hold an innocent and respectful view of the CIA, dutifully reporting every piece of information that comes their way from the Agency. “Today, the CIA disclosed…” Disclosed? Or fabricated?
The CIA is perhaps the biggest fake news operation in the world. It exhales fake news as matter of course.
So naturally, it attracts men and women who have a bias in favor of fabricating. “Do you dream about lying with impunity? Contact our personnel office for employment opportunities.”
If a lie serves a greater truth, release the lie. If a truth serves a greater lie, tell the truth. The old dictum, “garbage in, garbage out,” doesn’t apply to the Agency. The CIA is the Garbage Man for the known universe.
It’s rather astonishing, at this late date, that more people don’t get the con.
The CIA is a hustler operating a shell-game on a streetcorner. Except, lo and behold, all sorts of rubes are trying to jostle their way forward, to pay homage. And the cops are never going to show up to sweep the hustler away. The hustler is the cops.
"I was born to lie. But I always tell the truth. Trust me.”
Wikileaks Says Less Than 1% Of Vault 7 Released
Just 24 hours after the release of ‘Vault 7, Zero Day’, Wikileaks has claimed that less than 1% of Vault 7 has been released ‘so far’.
This is surely to generate not only excitement amongst security analysts, researchers, software engineers and hackers alike, but considerable dread within the intelligence community.
Wikileaks ‘dump’ of Vault 7 has already caused a flurry not only within the mainstream media but noticeable reactions of companies mentioned within ‘Zero Day’ cache such as Apple, Google, Telegram, Signal, Samsung, and Microsoft, whom back in February called for a ‘Digital Geneva Convention’.
WikiLeaks’ data dump on Tuesday accounted for less than one percent of ‘Vault 7’, a collection of leaked CIA documents which revealed the extent of its hacking capabilities, the whistleblowing organization has claimed on Twitter.
‘Year Zero’, comprising 8,761 documents and files, was released unexpectedly by WikiLeaks. The organization had initially announced that it was part of a larger series, known as ‘Vault 7.’
However, it did not give further information on when more leaks would occur or on how many series would comprise ‘Vault 7’…
The leaks have revealed the CIA’s covert hacking targets, with smart TVs infiltrated for the purpose of collecting audio, even when the device is powered off.
The Google Android Operating System, used in 85 percent of the world’s smartphones, was also exposed as having severe vulnerabilities, allowing the CIA to “weaponize” the devices.
The CIA would not confirm the authenticity of the leak. “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.” Jonathan Liu, a spokesman for the CIA, is cited as saying in The Washington Post.
WikiLeaks claims the leak originated from within the CIA before being “lost” and circulated amongst “former U.S. government hackers and contractors.” From there the classified information was passed to WikiLeaks.
End-to-end encryption used by applications such as WhatsApp was revealed to be futile against the CIA’s hacking techniques, dubbed ‘zero days’, which were capable of accessing messages before encryption was applied.
The leak also revealed the CIA’s ability to hide its own hacking fingerprint and attribute it to others, including Russia.
An archive of fingerprints – digital traces which give a clue about the hacker’s identity – was collected by the CIA and left behind to make others appear responsible.
Ontario Pulls Plug On 36,000 Rural ‘Smart’ Meters: Is Big Energy Imploding?
& This Former Techie Owes His Fortune To Electronic Devices - Now He Thinks They're Dangerous March 11 2017 | From: CollectiveEvolution / MotherJones / Various
Last night I watched The Big Short - maybe the most important Hollywood film in years. This true story is a powerful and eloquent invitation to wake up to the sheer depravity at the core of the system of commerce.
The fact that the film got nominated for 5 Oscars including Best Picture is a huge sign that there are way more people waking up than we ever thought. The wrongs may not be getting righted as quickly as we’d like, but it is happening.
The reality of this shift is clearly evidenced by this news last week from Ontario. After years of obvious problems, Hydro One finally admitted that rural ‘smart’ meters do not work, and has decided to pull the plug on 36,000 of them - to start. We will see more utilities begin to do likewise.
[UPDATE: BC Hydro just announced plans to remove 88,000 meters suspected of failure.]
Costing ratepayers billions, smart meters are actually designed to unlawfully harvest detailed data of the in-home activities of occupants without their knowledge or consent.
"“Astonishing,” was the reaction from Lanark-area MPP Randy Hillier, who has been deluged with complaints about Hydro One billing and smart-meter suspicions.
I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the last five years, saying we’ve got problems with smart meters in rural Ontario.”
Since first being elected in 2007, no single issue has attracted as much attention in his riding, he said.
For the purpose of clarification: at this time Hydro One is not planning to uninstall smart meters and replace with analogs - but rather to manually read rural customers’ meters quarterly, and estimate the months in between, because the wireless reporting is simply not working.
More than 10,000 billing complaints have been filed with the Ontario Ombudsman, and the Auditor General of Ontario released a scathing report, calling out the smart metering program as a total flop.
Hydro One was the first major utility in Canada to deploy so-called ‘smart’ meters upon an unsuspecting customer base. The price tag for rollout, paid for by the people of Ontario, was $2 billion - which was $900M over budget.
Go Green, or Go Greed?
For those new to this topic, here’s the skinny. Smart utility meters are being deployed worldwide under the banner of climate action.
But they typically increase energy usage, and a high-level industry executive has admitted that the data collected by the surreptitious devices will be worth “a lot more” than the electricity itself.
Portland State University recently published a brilliant report on the morally-bankrupt surveillance agenda behind smart meters. The industry-gutting report is titled “The Neoliberal Politics of ‘Smart’: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form,” and excerpts can be read at Smart Grid Awareness here.
Customers are not being informed how their constitutional rights are being violated for the purposes of a for-profit home surveillance network. Nor how this technology has caused thousands of fires which have resulted in several deaths. Nor how our bodies are being affected by pulsed microwave radiation exponentially stronger than cell phones, as shown in Take Back Your Power.
If there wasn’t an avalanche of facts to back all of this up, it might sound too unbelievable to be true. But we live in strange times.
We Can Handle The Truth
Just like the banking system, the energy system has likewise become rotten to the core. To change both will require a complete overhaul and the embrace of a challenge to our comfort zone.
It is both harrowing and exciting for one to discover that there are major societal programs which are simply manufactured lies fueled by the idea of lack. That there’s not enough energy, food, resources, money. In reality, there is enough for all life to survive - and to thrive. It is provable fact that these truths have been suppressed.
Meanwhile, the energy mafia in Nevada just decreed a 40% fee hike for solar-producing customers, while reducing the amount paid for excess power sold to the grid, effectively killing the solar industry there.
There is a war on energy. When we understand the level of corruption involved, the implications are enormous. And we must act to solve this problem.
I believe that the suppression of solutions is a dam ready to burst. And I’m optimistic of our passing through this dark night successfully, as we are learning to connect and serve the higher good. There is really no other choice.
This Former Techie Owes His Fortune To Electronic Devices - Now He Thinks They're Dangerous
Silicon Valley isn't the best place to be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields.
Peter Sullivan and I are driving around Palo Alto, California, in his black Tesla Roadster when the clicking begins. The $2,500 German-made instrument resting in my lap is picking up electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from a nearby cell tower.
As we follow a procession of BMWs and Priuses into the parking lot of Henry M. Gunn High School, the clicking crescendos into a roar of static. "I can feel it right here," Sullivan says, wincing as he massages his forehead. The last time he visited the tower, he tells me, it took him three days to recover.
Sullivan is among the estimated 3 percent of people in California who claim they are highly sensitive to EMFs, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by wireless routers, cellphones, and countless other modern accouterments.
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome - famously suffered by the brother of Jimmie McGill, the lead character on AMC's Better Call Saul - is not a formally recognized medical condition in most countries and it has little basis in mainstream science. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies have essentially concluded that the problem is in peoples' heads.
That's what Sullivan used to think, too. A Stanford computer science major who has worked as a software designer for Excite, Silicon Graphics, and Netflix, he paid little mind to EMFs, which he once viewed as harmless and inevitable. His wife joined Google early on and now serves as its chief culture officer - founder Sergey Brin sometimes drops by the couple's home sporting Google Glass.
"I thought that anybody that talked about the health effects of EMFs was a complete idiot. I thought that they just were not science-y," Sullivan recalls. But then he got sick.
Around 2005, Sullivan started having trouble sleeping. He lost weight precipitously and struggled to maintain focus. After his top-flight Stanford doctors failed to figure out what was wrong with him, he tried every alternative remedy on the books, from cutting out gluten to taking chelating agents to purge his body of heavy metals.
Nothing really worked. He noticed, however, that he felt weird after talking on a cellphone or plugging into a laptop charger. So like any good health hacker, he kept debugging.
A feng shui consultant in Silicon Valley knew a guy in Los Angeles who called himself a "building biologist" and had reputedly worked wonders for Richard Gere.
Sullivan flew the guy up to his $6 million home in a leafy Los Altos neighborhood and watched with interest as the man probed the baseboards of Sullivan's newly renovated bedrooms, bulky instruments flashing and buzzing.
The consultant's verdict: Sullivan's house was an EMF disaster zone. The wifi and cordless phones would have to go. He'd need to rip out the walls and change everything.
This was a bit like asking a winemaker to quit drinking or advising an auto exec to commute on a fixie. Sullivan took things slow at first, installing some metal shielding around the electrical conduits in his downtown Los Altos office to block a portion of the radiation.
He subsequently found that a 30-minute catnap in his office left him more replenished than a whole night's sleep at home, so he began napping there regularly. One day when he felt like the EMFs in his home were really messing with him, he drove up to a hiking trail in the Los Altos hills and slept in the parking lot.
By the time I met Sullivan in person, one bright day this past spring, he had regained the lost weight and was feeling good. A former Navy pilot who used to land fighter jets on aircraft carriers, Sullivan still has a military crispness in his posture and elocution.
Having recently retired from tech at age 40, he now devotes most of his time to exposing the hazards of EMFs. He has even brought up the matter with a few high-ranking friends at Google.
"This is the new smoking," he recalls telling them. "It's just like the beginning days, when the evidence is there and people aren't catching on."
Many controlled studies do, in fact, show that people who claim to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity experience symptoms when exposed to electromagnetic fields.
But if those same people are unaware that the EMFs are present, the correlation between the symptoms and the exposure evaporates.
The leading explanation is what's known as the "nocebo" effect - people feel sick when exposed to something they believe is bad for them.
Case in point: In 2010, residents of the town of Fourways, South Africa, successfully petitioned for a cellphone tower to be removed due to a rash of illness in the area. It was later revealed that the tower wasn't operational during the period of the complaints.
A $25 million study released in May by the National Toxicology Program found that male rats exposed to radio-frequency radiation, the kind emitted by cellphones, were more likely to develop two forms of cancer - although the findings were controversial.
Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California-Berkeley and a believer in electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome, argues that the wireless industry has used its financial clout to suppress essential health research.
"This is very much like tobacco back in the 1950s," he concurs. "The industry has co-opted many researchers and has stopped funding many people who were finding evidence of harm."
Sullivan, who majored in psychology as an undergraduate, refuses to believe that he's just being neurotic. Through his foundation, Clear Light Ventures, he has given about $1 million to anti-EMF advocacy groups and researchers that the wireless industry won't touch.
They include retired Washington State University biochemistry professor Martin Pall, who has proposed a biological mechanism for EHS, and Harvard neurology professor Martha Herbert, who has suggested there could be links between EMFs and autism.
Laura Torres, who worked with Sullivan in the early 1990s as a product manager at Silicon Graphics, remembers him as a guy who "totally thinks outside the box."
He created software to log customer service calls, then a novel invention and a big-time saver for the company's tech support team. "He really takes a creative approach to solving problems, which I think is what he is doing with this EMF thing," she says.
Sullivan says his anti-EMF advocacy should not be viewed as an affront to his fellow techies:
"We are hoping that the industry, instead of being like tobacco and going through denial, will be more like the automotive industry and say, 'Okay, we are just going to keep improving safety. We will sell you more stuff that is safer and lower power.' And it will be a win for everybody."
During my visit, Sullivan walks me through his home's $100,000 worth of EMF-proofing. In his wood-paneled home office he points out a $1,000 Alan Maher technical ground, a device that helps channel electrical noise away from power outlets, and a plug-in Stetzer filter, which makes "a nice clean sine wave in your electricity," as my host puts it.
He flips a desktop switch to cut off power to his MacBook - he rarely works on it while it's charging. He made an exception last night after the battery died and says he ended up feeling wired and jittery as a result.
We step outside and through a gate, crunching over groundcover to the shingled exterior of his first-floor bedroom. Sheets of black mesh hang from a nearby fence to block a neighbor's wifi signal. A nearby power line is wrapped in a material that dissipates certain electrical frequencies as friction, like a string dampener on a tennis racquet.
Sullivan has installed a switch by his bed that lets him shut off his home's electricity while he sleeps.
"Our bedroom is like camping!" he says proudly. "We have all the luxury of being inside, but none of the EMFs."
Indoors on a kitchen stool his wife, Stacy, is hunched over a laptop plugged into an ethernet cable. "She's in wireless jail," Sullivan jokes.
"I used to be able to just do this wherever I wanted to work," she responds wistfully. "But it's okay."
In terms of protection, this residence doesn't even compare with another one Sullivan owns in the Los Altos hills. We hop in his Tesla (modified to shield him from its EMFs) and drive there. Originally built in the early 1900s as a hunting lodge, it had been renovated into a shrine to modernism by an HP executive.
Sullivan bought it a few years ago and converted it into what he calls a "model healthy home." He's hoping its shielded environment will help me to understand what sudden exposure to EMFs feels like.
In an empty upstairs bedroom that Sullivan sometimes uses as an office, a graphite paint called WiShield coats the walls. Clear, EMF-blocking films cover the windows. Conductive tape on the floor carries any electrical current to a high-frequency ground in the closet. Sullivan switches on his EMF meter: zero. "I thrive on it!" he says. "I get my best work done here."
He hands me a bottle of oxygenated water and instructs me to down it. This will supposedly unclump my blood, heightening my EMF sensitivity. Rummaging through the closet, he emerges with an air pump from his son's aquarium. He has discovered that this pump maxes out his instruments, producing "a fucking nightmare magnetic field."
He holds it a couple of feet away from me and switches it on. I feel a small cramp in my stomach.
Maybe Sullivan was onto something. After all, birds and sea turtles use Earth's magnetic fields to navigate, and foxes seem able to rely on them to detect prey.
Then again, maybe all I'd felt was the nocebo effect. Sullivan suggested that I get to the bottom of it by spending a night at the shielded house. I didn't feel the need, I told him, but I understood why he might.
"When I wake up, it just feels like you can do anything," he'd assured me. "You just feel completely different, like your world has changed."
Vault 7 Bombshell Just Vindicated Every Conspiracy Theorist: The CIA Can Spy On Anyone Through TVs, iPhones, Smart Phones And Windows PCs + Former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino Set To Release New Info On Obama: “It’s Going To Blow Wide Open This Week” & Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook Confirms He Knew About Wiretaps March 10 2017 | From: NaturalNews / TheDaily Sheeple / Various
Another deep state bombshell just hit the ‘net with WikiLeaks’ release of over 8,000 pages of once-secret documents from inside the CIA. The release is dubbed “Vault 7.”
While it’s going to take internet sleuths several days to pour through all the documents and find full details of what they reveal, some of the highlights include these bombshells:
“Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.
This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive."
““Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones."
Smart Phones, Smart TVs and iPhones Can All be Turned Into Surveillance Microphones
In essence, the CIA developed malware exploits that could defeat almost any mobile devices (iPhones, Android, Blackberry, etc.) or personal computer (Apple, Windows and Google devices).
Mobile devices can be turned into remote surveillance microphones that listen to everything you say and upload the audio to the CIA.
“The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone,” explains WikiLeaks.
Samsung smart TVs can also be transformed into spy microphones, even when they appear to be turned off. This is accomplished by a CIA exploit known as “Weeping Angel.” As WikiLeaks explains:
“Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.".
In essence, the Vault 7 document dump just proved every “conspiracy theorist” to be correct about government spying through TVs and other devices.
Seizing Control Over Vehicles to Carry Out “Undetectable Assassinations” of Vehicle Occupants
In addition to hacking computers and mobile devices, the CIA was also working on ways to remotely control targeted vehicles, turning them into “assassination machines” which could be directed to kill the occupants by driving into obstacles at high speed, for example. As WikiLeaks explains:
“As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations."
Encryption Apps Rendered Obsolete by CIA “Zero Day” Exploits
In what will surely be a shock to nearly everyone, the CIA also developed 24 “weaponized” exploits for Android devices that allow it to completely bypass the encryption of popular apps:
“These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied."
In addition, the Vault 7 documents contained over 22,000 routable IP addresses in the United States that were redacted before final release. These IP addresses are believed to correspond to CIA targets, CIA listening post servers and test systems.
Former Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino Set To Release New Info On Obama: “It’s Going To Blow Wide Open This Week”
Former Obama Secret Service agent Dan Bongino suggests there’s a lot more to the story when it comes to ObamaGate and wiretapping.
Having been on the Presidential Protection Detail, Bongino is intimately familiar with how Presidents (he worked for George W. Bush and Barack Obama) handle their daily business. He has been in the room and heard it all.
On Monday, Bongino tweeted that he is set to release more information, presumably related to ObamaGate or other activities President Obama may have been involved in:
Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook Confirms He Knew About Wiretaps
As Obamagate heats up, more and more people are admitting that they had knowledge of the wiretaps.
Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook confirmed to Fox News that he had knowledge of wiretaps being used during the campaign.
“Today Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager told Fox he had knowledge of wiretaps being used during the campaign but he suggested they were targeted at Russian officials, not directly at Trump Tower.”
It’s funny to watch Democrats split hairs as they try to dance around the wiretapping scandal.
It’s hard to believe that Mook really thought the wiretaps were meant for Russian officials when the entire reason for the wiretaps was to take down Trump – the man running against his boss, Hillary.
Or perhaps Mook is telling the truth since he believes Trump is a secret agent working on behalf of the Russian government which would make him technically a Russian official. See what I did there?
WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 Shows How CIA Spies On Your TV, Phone, PC, Mac, And More + Napolitano: Trump First President To Confront Deep State March 9 2017 | From: TheFreeThoughtProject / Infowars / Various
Only hours ago, WikiLeaks released what it claims to be the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA.
This dump comes on the heels of a preview that the Free Thought Project reported on last month, in which WikiLeaks released documents showing the CIA’s role in interfering with French elections.
It involves a massive cache of data ranging from the years 2013-2016.
Inside this data, according to WikiLeaks, are the tools the CIA has been using for years to wreak digital havoc on the world. According to the release:
“Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.
This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.
The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive."
WikiLeaks notes that this is only the first part of a series they are calling “Year Zero,” which is comprised of 8,761 documents and files from an isolation high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina.
“Year Zero,” according to WikiLeaks, introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
This leak exposes the massive hacking powerhouse the CIA has become in the last decade - surpassing even that of the NSA.
“Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force - its own substantial fleet of hackers.
The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities."
What is also notable about this leak is the fact that it reveals another Snowden-type whistleblower within the massive spying apparatus. This time, however, knowing how the US treats whistleblowers, the source has chosen to remain anonymous.
“The source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.
The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
Cyber weapons pose a massive threat to the entire world’s infrastructure as they can be used by anyone from rival states, cyber mafias, and even teenage hackers.
According to Julian Assange;
“There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade.
But the significance of ‘Year Zero’ goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective.”
Noting the severe implications of releasing these hacking tools publicly, WikiLeaks will avoid distributing the ‘armed’ version of the cyber weapons “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should analyzed, disarmed and published.”
To quantify the sheer size and scope of Vault 7, WikiLeaks notes that just part 1:
“Already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.”
One of the most ominous techniques profiled by WikiLeaks in Vault 7 is “Weeping Angel,” developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB) - a cyber weapon that infests smart TV’s and transforms them into microphones.
As WikiLeaks reports, after infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on.
In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
Upon news of ‘Weeping Angel,’ Kim Dotcom chimed in, noting that it is not just TV’s the CIA can control to spy on you.
“The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.
Despite iPhone’s minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA’s Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads.
CIA’s arsenal includes numerous local and remote “zero days” developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.
CIA Malware Targets Windows, OSx, Linux, Routers
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware.
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA’s Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as “Assassin” and “Medusa”.
Attacks against Internet infrastructure and webservers are developed by the CIA’s Network Devices Branch (NDB)."
WikiLeaks put the world on notice with the news of the encrypted torrent file Vault 7 last night, and, at 8:06 am EST, they tweeted out the key to unlock it.
Assange was planning a press conference to go over the data dump this morning. However, shortly before it was supposed to begin, they announced the Facebook and Periscope streams were under attack.
As for why WikiLeaks chose to release this information now, they explain:
"WikiLeaks published as soon as its verification and analysis were ready.
In Febuary the Trump administration has issued an Executive Order calling for a “Cyberwar” review to be prepared within 30 days.
While the review increases the timeliness and relevance of the publication it did not play a role in setting the publication date."
Finally, WikiLeaks leaves the rest of the data mining up to the public.
"WikiLeaks has intentionally not written up hundreds of impactful stories to encourage others to find them and so create expertise in the area for subsequent parts in the series.
They’re there. Look. Those who demonstrate journalistic excellence may be considered for early access to future parts."
The Free Thought Project is one of those outlets that will be bringing you our analysis of important information we find within these leaks. We will keep you updated as this, the largest leak in US history, unfolds.
In an appearance with Lou Dobbs, Napolitano laid out what the deep state is for the general public, and dropped bombshell after bombshell about its power to influence the behavior of presidents, obtain all manner of information about the general public and steer the direction of the country – regardless of which political group is supposedly in charge.
“Really, it’s been around since 1947: the deep state – the part of the government that never charges, regardless of which party controls Congress and which party is in the White House,” he explained.
“There are many, many aspects of the deep state; we’re talking about the intelligence community deep state – people in the intelligence community that have access to so much information about everyone."
“They can manipulate the President of the United States, and if they don’t like what he says, they can embarrass him, and if they want to control his thought patterns and decision making, they’ll keep information away from him.”
“Donald Trump has fallen victim to that, and he knows it, and he knows he has to stop it,” he concluded.
Napolitano asserted that Trump’s call for a congressional investigation into possible wiretapping and illegal surveillance of his campaign headquarters at Trump Tower is a nightmare for the deep state and their enablers in the federal government.
“[It is] the last thing his enemies in the intelligence community want, because if the American public learns that they have access to everything we type and everything we say, they will be repulsed by the power that this deep state group has that Congress gave them – they didn’t create this on their own,” he said.
“Congress enacted three pieces of legislation, which, with perverse interpretations of this legislation before a secret court, let’s them gather everything we say in real-time.”
Big Brother is Here - Zakharova Warns of Orwellian US Media
Have a listen to what Zakharova has to say in relation to "fake news". Is there a deliberate campaign to undermine trust in all traditional media, so that the public can no longer form an opinion?
The institution of the media, which was once revered and trusted for its journalistic standards, has now sunk so low that the average person is unable to accept it.
This can be dangerous, as it drives people to a new source - the internet. While alternative media, for the most part, is grassroots in protest to the mainstream media - many sources online are also false and it can difficult to determine an article's validity.
The media was once the fourth estate, whose role in a 'free and fair' democracy was to check, balance and scrutinise the actions of the state.
Today, the media is PR for the state - there is no lie they won't propagate, irrespective of the repercussions it has.
Napolitano referenced the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as the “secret court” which reviews and approves virtually all requests by the federal government to spy on foreign individuals present in the United States and intercept all of their communications, but these same requests – which are rarely denied – are being used to spy on Americans in shocking fashion.
“One of the FISA court warrants that I saw was, ‘for every customer of Verizon in the United States,’” revealed Napolitano.
“That’s 113 million people – including most of the federal government.”
Dobbs and Napolitano discussed the depth to which the inter-agency spying occurs, noting that even Congress, high-ranking military officers, and Supreme Court justices are intimately monitored.
“If they will surveil journalists, if they will spy on U.S. senators, why would they hesitate to spy on a presidential candidate?” concluded Dobbs.
Just weeks ago, Senator Charles Schumer lobbed a hardly-veiled threat at President Trump on behalf of the deep state, after Trump revealed that rogue elements of the intelligence community were leaking classified information about his conversations and meetings to the fifth column media and politicians.
“You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” said Schumer with a smile.
Chuck Schumer Says CIA is Plotting Revenge Against President Trump
Jim Hanson, vice president of the Center for Security Policy, told Fox News that his sources believe Obama administration operatives could be facing jail time if a proper investigation is carried out into illegal surveillance of Donald Trump and his campaign.
“Does anybody on earth with an above-room-temperature IQ believe [Obama] didn’t know about it and approve it? Of course he did,” Hanson said. “I’ve heard from inside the administration there may be people going to jail.”
ExtremeTech Explains: All About The Dark Web, And How To Use It + How To Start Browsing The Web Anonymously March 9 2017 | From: ExtremeTech / Digg
If you’ve paid any attention to online marketplaces for illegal goods like the now-defunct Silk Road or the FBI’s investigations into criminal in cyberspace, chances are you’ve heard the term “dark web.” Curious about what it means? You’ve come to the right place
The dark web is sometimes called onionland because of its content accessible only using services like Tor.
The rest of the internet is simply referred to as the clearweb, since it isn’t generally encrypted.
How Does the Dark Web Work?
The dark web works just about the same as the regular internet: it uses the same TCP/IP framework to transmit HTTP and FTP traffic within and between networks, over the same phone, cable or FiOS lines that carry regular internet traffic.
Content on the dark web consists of HTML webpages and their assets, just like it does on the rest of the web. In fact, under the hood, the dark web is the same as the regular web, with two important exceptions that also distinguish the dark web from the deep web.
First: the dark web isn’t indexed by search engines. Second, content on the dark web can’t be accessed with regular web browsing software alone; additional software is required to make the networks talk to one another.
This is because content on the dark web is hosted on overlay networks, which are physically connected to the internet but aren’t accessible to web crawlers.
That relative inaccessibility is because the dark web uses a complete, but fundamentally different, network addressing system than the web addresses most of us know and use.
Browsers like Chrome and Firefox are programmed to access website files using the DNS index, which turns a file’s unique address on its unique server into a string of text that you can type into your address bar.
Sites indexed by the DNS registry are accessible via top-level domains like .com and .org, among others.
After ICANN opened up the suffixing system to other strings of text, we started to see web addresses that look like home.cern and bit.ly - but you can still type those into your address bar and get to a website, because they’re in the official DNS registry.
Dark websites don’t participate in the DNS system, and web crawlers don’t have the software to get onto the dark web, so the dark web and the clearweb don’t really cross-pollinate.
How the Mysterious Dark Net is Going Mainstream
Content obscured in this way can still be accessed, but you need the right software. It’s a bit like a Wi-Fi network that doesn’t broadcast its SSID: you can only get access if you already know exactly how to find it.
Some content accessible only through Tor is hosted at a .onion pseudo-top-level domain, which means that in the right software, you might type in foobar.onion and get to the Foobar dark website.
Such software, including the Tor browser bundle, is capable of bridging the differences in network behavior between the dark web and the clearweb. But that only works when you’re using a compatible browser and have the right encryption.
Tor, Freenet and I2P are the most commonly cited examples of software capable of accessing the dark web. Typing a .onion address into your Chrome address bar won’t get you anywhere.
Click on the image above to open a larger version in a new window
Furthermore, many if not most .onion sites are generated sixteen-character “non-mnemonic” alphanumeric strings, rather than being composed of words like most clearweb URLs.
There also exists a difference in the path web traffic takes on the clearnet versus the dark web. Tor is valuable because it sends your own web traffic through multiple different network nodes, masking its origin and destination.
There’s significant overlap between VPNs and the dark web; both services use encryption and multiple network nodes to anonymize traffic. But VPNs deal with clearweb sites that participate in the DNS system, while dark web browsers deal with domains not recognized by ICANN.
What Is The Dark Web Used For?
The structure of the dark web makes it anonymizing, which means that first and foremost, it’s used for anonymous communication and web browsing. This accounts for the vast majority of network traffic through Tor.
Why seek out anonymity? To read and write about things that might get you in trouble, like political dissent or whistleblowing. The same technology that enables Tor is capable of tunneling out from behind the Great Firewall of China, and the US government contributes to the development of such software.
Anonymity also brings out those who wish to do illegal things. A 2014 study found that of the different kinds of sites on the dark net, there are more markets devoted to drugs and guns than any other kind of dark site, including forums, bitcoin laundering, hacking, fraud, whistleblowing and even regular old porn.
To paraphrase Jim Jeffries, if you want to murder someone, you can’t just walk up to Pier 31 and shout “GUNS, WHO WANTS TO SELL ME SOME GUNS!?” But with a website like an evil eBay that lists weapons and other contraband for sale, all of a sudden you don’t have to know someone with “black market connections.” You just have to be able to install some software.
Tor hidden services are the other thing the dark web does, and they’re what gives the dark web its shady reputation. Hidden services refers to dark sites where both the host and the visitor are anonymous to one another. That technology enables dark web sites that host illegal content to persist.
Hidden services account for only 1.5% of the Tor network volume. But the overwhelming majority of resources requested over Tor hidden services - fully 80% of that traffic - were requests from child abuse sites.
Outgoing traffic from the dark web flowed mainly between botnets and their hidden control servers. More detail on Tor’s traffic patterns and how much of its total bandwidth is used for illegal activities is available in a blog post by the Tor project.
The dark web is notoriously dodgy territory for both buyers and sellers. Law enforcement has been chipping away at the nominal anonymity afforded by software like Tor, and anything of interest on the dark web is as likely to be a scam as it is to be a honeypot.
Between social engineering and software vulnerabilities, it is a realm best accessed while wielding some trustworthy anti-malware.
For a long time, the Silk Road was the biggest game in darknet commerce. It allowed users to sell a great many illegal things, and inspired a number of similarly designed copycat markets.
Transactions there were conducted in bitcoins and other virtual currency, and then goods were shipped through the mail. But a high-profile bust and ensuing court case put several Silk Road admins in jail.
The media spotlight has impinged on the Silk Road’s relative obscurity, reducing its value as a black marketplace.
While Uncle Sam contributes to the development of Tor and similar anonymity resources, the government is also known to take more of a proprietary approach, considering even the dark web to be within American jurisdiction when site hosting is in question.
The FBI paid Carnegie Mellon to crack Tor in pursuit of a criminal case. They even waded into the muck and ran a huge sting operation on Playpen, a darknet child porn site - by taking over control of the site and running it for weeks as a poisoned well to catch its users.
The dark net is an excellent example of how difficult it is to prevent criminals from using anonymizing services designed to protect honest dissenters. Tor’s anonymizing functions are critically important to people who rely on it to discuss sensitive topics without fear of reprisal.
The debate over how much light should be shone into the dark web is an ongoing topic of discussion. How much illegal activity should be allowed to maintain Tor’s positive benefits, and is there a way to unmask child molesters and other illicit activity without compromising the security that makes the dark web work?
As with planting a tree or exercising, the best time to start practicing safe web browsing practices was 10 years ago. The second best time, however, is right now.
The good news is that you do not need to throw your computer into a dumpster. You can, in the span of an afternoon, take all the necessary steps to keep prying eyes our of your internet activity.
Mathematician breaks down how to defend against quantum computing attacks.
The simplest way to look at anonymous internet browsing is a three-pronged approach. You need to make sure all of your accounts are secure. You need to hide your internet traffic. And you need to encrypt your communications with other.
Secure Your Accounts
Even if everything you do and say on the web is entirely anonymous, that's all moot if someone can still duck into your email or bank account. So, before you start thinking about masking your online activities, check and make sure what's already on the web is accessible only to you.
The best way to do that is to make sure each and every one of your accounts has two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication, as the name implies, requires two things to log into an account.
The first is a password. The second is an external verification method such as a text message or an external verification app like Google Authenticator.
With two-factor authentication, someone could have your password but they can't log into your account without your phone where the text messages and authenticator apps live. It's kinda like using a key to get into your house and then being greeted by a very large man who, politely but firmly, asks you to recite a 6-digit number that's magically just popped into your head.
Sounds pretty awesome, right? The all-important caveat, however, is that not all websites have two-factor authentication implemented. Which is bad, because like chains, your account security is only as strong as the weakest link.
Anyone with your password and motivated enough could just log into a non-two-factor-protected account, dig around for some personal info and then social engineer their way into a two-factor protected account.
So yeah, you're going to want to make sure everything is doubly-secure.
You could dig around in the settings pages of the dozens or so web services you use to find if they do in fact offer two-factor authentication. That would be practicing a respectable amount of diligence on your part and we respect you for that.
But you could also just head to two-factor-auth.org and browse their handy list of services that use the security measure.1 And if you're unsure just how many internet accounts you have lying around, a good starting point is checking our your saved passwords in your browser of choice.
Hide Your Traffic
Shoring up account security is arguably the hardest part of this whole endeavor. The more technically complex process of encrypting your internet traffic is, practically-speaking, much easier.
Which: You have two choices, slow and free or fast and, erm, not-free.
The slow and free option is the Tor browser. Running on a modified version of the Firefox browser, Tor - which is short for The Onion Router - uses something called "onion routing" model to hide your traffic. Simply put, it works, but it can be slow as heck.
Normally, internet traffic works like passing a note in class. You write who the note is to so everyone else knows who to eventually pass it to, you write who it's from so the recipient can pass a note back, and it's also full of that hot gossip people want.
What Tor does is take that note and wrap it in a bunch of different notes that only certain people can open.
So a note that you want to eventually sent to Jenny is wrapped in three other notes that first goes off to Carl who opens the note and is instructed to pass that note to Terry who is then instructed to pass the note to Amy who is then instructed to finally to Jenny.
Ideally, there are so many notes being passed around that even the most watchful observer has no idea where one starts and the other ends.
A virtual private network (VPN), on the other hand, is much faster since you're just connecting to another network somewhere else on the globe. As the name suggest, it is like you're walking into another office somewhere else on the planet and (virtually) plugging an ethernet cable into your computer.
To the outside observer it just looks like some server in Switzerland is accessing Netflix.com. And if you choose a VPN that encrypts and does not log your traffic, it's impossible for anyone to see your web activities.
To draw on the passing-notes-in-class metaphor again, a VPN is like getting the principal to come to your classroom, pull Jenny out of the room and ask her if she likes you.
That said, it does come at a price. For a VPN that is fast and secure expect to pay somewhere around $10 a month. And although we do not endorse this practice, one of the added benefits of using a VPN is that you can access region locked content on various streaming services.
Keep Your Private Conversations Private
It's rude enough for a stranger to even eavesdrop on your conversations in a place as public as a park. So opting to use messaging services with end-to-end encryption doesn't make you some sort of criminal or tin foil hat-wearing nut.
Whether you mind or not, there are organizations out there that are just scooping up every chat (Hello NSA!) you send out over the internet.
No one is actively looking at them, or might ever look at them, but they're listening so you might as well turn some music on or something.
It's sort of like taping over your webcam or looking both ways before you cross the street - it's such an easy and painless thing to do that it far outweighs the consequences of not doing that thing.
What you're looking for is chat with end-to-end encryption - where only you can the recipient can decrypt the messages.
To, again, reuse the passing-a-note-in-class analogy, you and your friend both have a unique way to confirm you are who you say you are - in real life, handwriting; on the internet, a public key.
Click on the image above to view a larger version in a new window
The note is then encrypted using a randomly-generated cipher, which then is then also encrypted and can only be decrypted with the receiver's private key.
Admittedly, the analogy kinda breaks down here, but the end result is that this system ensures that messages sent to a single person can only be read by that person.
So: Which is best? If unflinching privacy is your aim, then Open Whisper Systems's Signal, is the industry gold-standard.
Our dev team here at Digg swears by it, and we would trust them with our life. Heck, even Edward Snowden endorses it.
That said, trying to convince all your contacts to download yet another messaging app is not the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, popular messaging apps like iMessage, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp all employ end-to-end encryption.
Both iMessage and WhatsApp have it enabled by default. To start and encrypted chat on Facebook Messenger you'll need to open a new Secret Conversation.
Other Smart Decisions
Keeping your accounts secure, and encrypting your traffic and communications will bring you 95 percent of the way towards keeping the snoops out. That said, there are a few considerations here and there you might want to keep in mind.
Most importantly is to keep in mind how you connect to the internet and who you're sharing that connection with.
Connecting to an unsecured, public Wi-Fi spot might be convenient, but you never know who else might be connected and monitoring your traffic or even inferring passwords based on Wi-Fi signals.
It's like using someone else's phone to call your friend. They now have your friends number, and in a more dated-reference, on a landline they have the option of picking up the phone in another room to eavesdrop.
Second is determining the physical location of the cloud services you use. It's a bit of a doomsday scenario, but if the government comes knocking for your data, it's much easier for a company who has servers overseas to deny that request.
So, for instance, in terms of usability Dropbox is a good cloud storage solution. However, all of their servers are based in the US, so if a subpoena drops for your data, you're kinda SOL. Clowdwards.net - a service that'll help you navigate the various VPN and cloud storage services - recommends Sync as an alternative.
Again, we want to stress that doing any of this will not make you some kind of a trenchcoat-wearing kook.
But really, even in a society where there's zero threat of someone peeking in on our online activities, there's no solid reason to just kinda leave this stuff hanging out in the breeze.
You tear up your credit card offers and bills, right? So, make sure your internet activities are anonymized.
DeepStateGate: Trump Ends The Wiretapping Innuendo Game By Dealing Himself In & Incompetent And A Criminal: Obama’s Wiretapping Of President Trump Icing On The Cake Of Worst President Ever March 8 2017 | From: Breitbart / TheGatewayPundit / Various
The White House statement on “DeepStateGate” - President Donald Trump’s allegations that former President Barack Obama ordered surveillance on him during his 2016 presidential campaign - has the feel of cards and chips thumping down on the table.
The White House is placing a substantial bet on what Congress will uncover. Don’t expect those cards to be dealt swiftly because such investigations take time.
The Trump administration can distinguish itself by cooperating energetically with this one and helping it move forward quickly. Rest assured that no matter how long it takes, the media will never consider it “old news” as long as there remains any chance for anyone connected with the Trump 2016 campaign to get in trouble over contacts with the Russians.
It’s possible one reason Trump issued his explosive tweets on surveillance was to make everyone put up or shut up.
That might already be working, as some of the more aggressive dealers in unsubstantiated innuendo are suddenly admitting they don’t have any actual evidence. There can’tbe any hard evidence if Trump is super-duper wrong about Obama administration surveillance:
Until now, Democrats and their media have been pleased to create the impression that all kindsof wiretapping operations were conducted against the Trump campaign, uncovering many scandalous, possibly illegal connections.
Only by reading those articles carefully does one discover the sources are highly speculative and the evidence is thin at best.
The much-discussed New York Times piece from January 19 is a perfect example of this.
It begins by matter-of-factly confirming the existence of the wiretaps everyone in Obamaworld is now swearing are a figment of Donald Trump’s imagination.
Mountains of innuendo about connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence have been spun out of what these abruptly non-existent intercepts contained, according to the anonymous leakers who currently drive almost 100 percent of mainstream media coverage.
But if you read that New York Times article carefully, it admits the communications intercepts may not exist, and if they do, no one can confirm what they actually say (emphasis added):
“American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him.
As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.
It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November.
The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C."
Whatever President Trump’s intentions were in using Twitter to touch off this firestorm, one of the immediate effects has been letting the gas out of all those speculative Trump stories.
The Democratic media is now furiously working to prove all of its own previous coverage of the Trump-Russia allegations was little more than idle speculation, every bit as lacking in hard evidence as Trump’s accusation that Obama was tapping his phones.
After months of unfounded allegations and badly sourced speculation intended to cripple his administration, maybe Trump wanted to prove that only one side of the partisan divide is permitted to make “wild allegations.”
Obama’s plants in the Deep State can leak whatever they please, law and truth be damned.
They can get an avalanche of hostile coverage moving with a few phone calls or emails. The media feels no contrition when the story turns out to be exaggerated or completely false, eagerly turning to the same Obama holdovers as sources for the next big phony scoop.
No one on Trump’s team, including the president himself, is allowed to reciprocate in kind. We are meant to feel bottomless outrage that Trump would level unsubstantiated allegations against Obama, but apparently, Obama’s minions can launch a constant barrage of unsubstantiated allegations against Trump.
Intentionally or accidentally, Trump just forced the press to admit how weak the bulk of those allegations were. The wiretapping timeline that has drawn so much attention since Saturday night was largely based on mainstream media reporting.
The media is effectively saying;
“Hey, wait, we were just blowing smoke. We didn’t think anyone would take those reports seriously and build a case that Obama was wiretapping Trump.
We just wanted to make Trump look bad by pumping up vague rumors that he and his campaign might have been under observation!”
Amazingly, the same media that just went through 48 hours of convulsions over a bogus “perjury” charge against Attorney General Jeff Sessions is happy to cite an actual, admitted perjurer, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as an unimpeachable source on the exact issue he lied about to Congress.
"All of this was part of a coordinated planned campaign by people that are linked to Barrack Obama."
There are still senior people in jobs at the Director of National Intelligence office, the office of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency that ought to be fired, Larry Johnson, retired CIA and State Department official, told RT.
They also expect the American people to trust former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, who openly bragged of his ability to mislead credulous reporters and construct phony narratives to sell the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for surveillance and using government power against its political enemies is a matter of shameful record. The no-holds-barred “Resistance” mindset among Democrats is painfully obvious. If they are running a “silent coup” against Trump, it’s the loudest silent coup in history. You can scarcely sleep at night over the racket this silent coup makes.
Sorry, DNC Media, no sale. In the absence of hard evidence one way or the other, Team Obama is not going to win a credibility shootout with Team Trump.
McCarthy’s Sunday post on the matter is well worth reading in full. His key point is that some highly unusual FISA requests for surveillance on the Trump campaign weremade and were denied by the court, as very few such requests are.
The Obama administration was persistent and eventually obtained the authorization it wanted, but there is reason to suspect it was not entirely candid with the FISA court on its final, successful request.
McCarthy points out that if Obama believed half of what the Democrats tout as sacred truth about the Russians working with Trump’s campaign, he would have been negligent notto authorize the kind of surveillance Trump is angry about, and there is “a less than zero chance” surveillance could have been imposed “without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.”
Robert Barnes at LawNewz also explores the idea of the FISA court approving a warrant that was submitted without Trump’s name but “which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump.”
He suggests the most serious legal jeopardy that might be facing the people involved in such an effort would be perjury for lying to the FISA court and the dissemination of collected intelligence that should have been kept tightly classified. Instead, he cites reports that Obama acted to reduce the restrictions on sharing this information and to preserve material that should have been destroyed.
What McCarthy and Barnes are describing is plausible and consistent with the behavior of the Obama administration over many years. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically true, but it shouldbe investigated, every bit as thoroughly as Russian activity in the 2016 election cycle.
Trump’s weekend tweets may have finally put an end to speculative reporting, strategic leaking, and innuendo. Perhaps the only way to end that game was for Trump to deal himself in.
Incompetent And A Criminal: Obama’s Wiretapping Of President Trump Icing On The Cake Of Worst President Ever
With President Obama’s actions disclosed over the weekend by President Donald Trump, there is no longer any argument that Obama was the Worst President Ever.
President Donald Trump shared in a series of tweets yesterday that President Barack Obama had him wire tapped during the election.
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
He next tweeted:
“Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!"
Next the President tweeted:
“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!"
The final for four tweets concerning the wire tapping:
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"
Not surprising after the shock of what was presented by the current President to the public, the left wing media, their Democrat allies and the few #NeverTrump Republicans who align in their opposition to President Trump went all in for former President Obama.
Their responses no longer surprise America.
Americans would be shocked if they criticized former President Obama. As a result of the recent Presidential campaign, Americans are used to seeing the corrupt media and Democrats (including #NeverTrumpers) react as they do.
Now America is supposed to believe that the narcissist President Obama was looking out for America when he tapped President Trump at Trump Tower during the election?
This former President who chose not to investigate his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, for known abuses with foreign entities in her Clinton Foundation, felt the need to wire tap her competitor during the election for no known reason?
Based on his deceiving track record, it is clear that President Obama wanted to gain information against future President Trump that he could use against him.
This is Obamagate. Hopefully, the final chapter in Obama’s failed Presidency.
Unlike the media that is still cheerleading for serial liar Obama, most Americans stand by the side of their current President Trump, and rightly so.
See the Following for More Reasons Why Obama is the ‘Worst. President. Ever’:
Major Fake News Peddlers Barred From White House Coverage + Google Refuses To Provide Any Evidence To Justify Blacklisting Of Natural News: Webmaster Guidelines A “Black Box Of Total Bullshit” March 1 2017 | From: Geopolitics / JonRappoport / NaturalNews / Various
In an unprecedented move from the White House, reporters from CNN, The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed were not allowed into the session in the office of press secretary Sean Spicer.
Reporters at the Associated Press and Time magazine walked out of the briefing when hearing that others had been barred from the session, Reuters said.
This latest action from the Trump government stems from the fact that no matter what he has done for the past 30 days, nothing positive has made it to the mainstream media. What is supposedly a news item, reads more like an opinion piece.
This proactive measure against the most effective tool of the Deep State should decapitate its ability to control how people think about their new government, effectively preventing them from steering the Trump government away from its campaign commitments, which are now being delivered a day at a time.
Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus Interview at CPAC 2017
American Conservative Union chairman conducts interview with Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus at CPAC 2017
The fake news mainstream media is already struggling to adjust with the new reality.
"Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, said in a statement.
“We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”
The White House Correspondents Association, or WHCA, also protested.
“The WHCA board is protesting strongly against how today’s gaggle is being handled by the White House,” said Jeff Mason, president of the association and a Reuters reporter.
… CNN posted a Twitter message on Friday afternoon saying: “This is an unacceptable development by the Trump White House. Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like. We’ll keep reporting regardless.”
Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, said in a statement: “While we strongly object to the White House’s apparent attempt to punish news outlets whose coverage it does not like, we won’t let these latest antics distract us from continuing to cover this administration fairly and aggressively.”
“I think we’re going to aggressively push back. We’re just not going to sit back and let false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there.”
A day before, Chief Strategist Steve Bannon took a direct aim at the “corporatist, globalist” media, who he asserted “will not give you your country back without a fight.”
"
It’s not going to get better - it’s going to get worse every day. The press is adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.” - Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist
Indeed, the fake news mainstream media need to understand that they could not control the narrative anymore. They must realize that their days are over.
"They Want You Purged" - NRA Head Rages Against Violent Left "Terrorists"
Wayne Lapierre, executive director of the NRA. pulled no punches in a fiery speech yesterday, painting anti-Donald Trump protesters as violent extremists and compared their disruptions to terrorism during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.
As NBC News reports, Lapierre's comments were among the strongest against the left and the media during the conference in which bashing those opposing Trump's agenda has been a prominent theme.
"Ladies and gentlemen, another definition of terrorism is violence in the name of politics," said Wayne Lapierre, executive director of the NRA. "And criminal violence has no place in political debate."
"The left's message is absolutely clear. They want revenge, you've got to be punished," Lapierre said."They say you're what's wrong with America and now you've got to be purged."
He said many on the extreme left "literally hate everything America stands for" and "are willing to use violence against us."
Lapierre also warned that terrorists could infiltrate the political demonstrations that are widely publicized on social media.
"What happens when terrorists tag along with a flash mob protest at your local airport?"he asked.
Still, we note, as opposed to leftist leaders and activist funders, Lapierre never called for his supporters to "rise up" or "bear arms" against people who disagreed with his perspective (but warns the opposition there will be a reaction).
UKIP’s former leader, Nigel Farage received a standing ovation at CPAC this year. He led the way for Brexit and supported Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle. He gave a wonderful speech at CPAC today with a powerful message of nationalism and even mocked CNN.
Nigel Farage: “Great though the night of November the 8th was. My favorite part of 2016 wasn’t so much the victories…no..no! My favorite part of that evening of November the 8th was watching the face of the CNN presenters!
Would You Censor Alex Jones and Mike Adams if You Could?
I write this in the wake of Google’s takedown of Mike Adams’ Natural News, and adroll.com’s decision to stop placing product-ads for Alex Jones’ infowars. These are momentous events.
In the current climate, there are MANY people who would, at the drop of a hat, censor and erase a news outlet if they could. And they would believe they’re doing Good.
Their knowledge of the 1st Amendment and its implications? Zero. Free speech? Who cares? Much better to delete, erase, scream, light fires, turn over cars, block speakers, shout them down.
Here are several statements about free speech written by non-screamers:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
-
First Amendment to the United States Constitution. December 15, 1791
“There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly TERRIBLE to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a FREE PRESS.”
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Samuel Adams, 1768
“Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.”
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Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992
But you see, there are now many groups who have traveled miles past a tolerance for ideas they despise. And these aren’t merely people in the street. Google apparently has passed the point of tolerance.
So has adroll.com, a company that makes money by placing ads for clients like infowars. Then we have college professors and students from shore to shore, who insist on silencing those who dissent from their political ideology.
And Facebook and Twitter are practicing censorship. To say nothing of major media outlets, who block stories that contradict their covert agendas.
President Trump Slams ‘Fake News’ Media at CPAC
"I want you all to know we are fighting the fake news!" President Donald Trump slammed the “fake news” media at CPAC in a speech of epic proportions.
There is always a THEY whose words and ideas are too dangerous to allow into the light. This assumption is shared by strange bedfellows: defenders of the National Security State and paid provocateurs throwing bricks at car windshields.
There is always a reason to shut people up.
“I’m in favor of free speech, but when (insert name) goes off on one of his crazy diatribes, he’s threatening basic human values, and he has to be stopped.” Yes, and who appointed this “human-values defender” king?
Obama recently told an audience that news needs to be “curated” in some way, in order to limit the infection of “fake news.” Who appointed him to stand in for the 1st Amendment?
Peter Maass, The Intercept:
"…the Obama administration has used the draconian 1917 law [the Espionage Act] to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.”
No problem. The president takes precedence over the Constitution, doesn’t he? Ask any college student, as long as you insert Obama’s name for “president,” and not Trump’s name.
It all depends, you see. It all depends on who is speaking about free speech. And it all depends on who is being attacked. It’s relative.
If you’re a medical blogger living in mommy’s basement, and you attack Mike Adams for his medical views, you’re golden. You want to limit Mike’s 1st Amendment rights? Why not? “Mike is dangerous. Mike is a threat to real science. Therefore, who cares if Google delisted his web site?”
The Constitution was actually an exercise in political and social relativity, right? It was never intended to mean what it said. It was always a “floater,” designed to favor good and oppose evil - and those moral decisions have to be made by “the wise ones.”
Shortly after the election results in November, the CIA-connected Washington Post launched a campaign against “fake news” sites. The campaign quickly morphed into: these sites aided a Russian op to throw the election to Trump.
In other words, free speech was actually aiding and abetting a crime. That’s the way it was positioned.
Smear free speech as criminal. Any which way.
Here is another excuse for censoring free speech: “It is engendering hate.” Accepting that premise, every presidential campaign in the history of the United States could have been shut down. Untold numbers of statements made by pundits about presidents in office could have been blocked.
If a person “taking offense” at something someone says becomes the standard for censoring “offending remarks,” Congress should pass a law requiring silence 24/7 from all citizens.
So: who would censor a political website if they could? Huge numbers of clueless people with an ax to grind. They would do it without a moment’s thought. They would do it without a shred of understanding. They would do it based on zero knowledge of the Bill of Rights.
They would do it minus an education that reveals how rational debate is a prerequisite for the survival of a Republic. They would do it based on zero knowledge of the meaning of “Republic.”
They would do it with the reflex of cows munching on grass in a pasture. And even worse, few people would voice objections to the act of censorship.
“I would rather eat a cupcake, watch Law&Order, play World of Warcraft, put mustard on a hot dog, hand out a trophy for ‘participation’ than object to censorship.”
Or this: “I don’t like Alex Jones and Mike Adams. Never did. So while I defend the basic right to free speech, I don’t really care if they’re hamstrung. I don’t care if they’re blocked in some way. On balance, it’s a good thing. I pick my battles, and this isn’t one of them…”
Really? What about MSNBC? Suppose the network was shut down and censored? Would such an action rate as a serious incursion on the 1st Amendment? What about censorship of the Huffington Post or Politico or CNN? Would that rate a howl of protest?
Let’s have a scale of importance. Take names like Karl Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Plato, St. Augustine, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger…
Decide how to rank them, in terms of who is deserving of outright censorship. Then, burn the 1st Amendment. Burn it to ashes, scatter the ashes in a fetid swamp, and celebrate the victory of “moral values” and the protection of the citizenry over “dangerous freedom.”
I PICK MY BATTLES.
FREEDOM, UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS, IS A GOOD THING. BUT KNOWING WHO THE BAD PEOPLE ARE AND SHUTTING THEM UP IS PRIOR TO ALLOWING FREEDOM. AFTER ALL, WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER. OUR CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE. MUMBLE, MUMBLE…
The 1st Amendment isn’t there so we can admire the freedom of the people who utter what we already agree with. The 1st Amendment is there so we can rise up to a higher level, where we defend the rights of the people who are uttering all the wrong things, the things we’re quite sure are wrong.
Well, except for Trump. Except for Hillary. Or Bannon. Pelosi. Ryan. Or Alex Jones and Mike Adams.
This is the age of information. Some information. Select information. Good information. Proper information.
Fake News Shunned At White House Press Conference
As Hillary’s campaign manager joins Washington Post, several mainstream media outlets were disinvited from a White Whouse press “gaggle”. And while MSM whines about 1st Amendment, HuffPo banns a Norwegian contributor who dared to tell the truth about Sweden being terrorized by refugees.
Google Refuses To Provide Any Evidence To Justify Blacklisting Of Natural News: Webmaster Guidelines A “Black Box Of Total Bullshit”
We’re now five days into Google’s total blacklisting ban of the entire NaturalNews.com website, and Google still won’t provide us with any real evidence of why we’ve been banned.
According to a webmaster tools interface from Google, we’ve been flagged for a “Manual Action” by Google, which means a human being made a decision to blacklist the entire Natural News website.
The issue Google claims Natural News has violated is called a “sneaky mobile redirect” which Google describes as “Some pages on this site appear to be redirecting users on a mobile device to other content not made available to a search engine crawler.”
Yet Google refuses to tell us what script they claim is causing this or even what pages they claim are behaving this way. Even more astonishingly, there isn’t a single person in the entire Google Products Webmaster Forum who can reproduce this behavior.
No One Can Reproduce it, and Google Refuses to Explain Why
Nobody on the planet can find a single example, in other words, of Natural News pages engaging in “sneaky mobile redirect” behavior.
In essence, unless and until Google provides any real evidence of the “violations” committed by Natural News, reasonable people can only conclude this entire issue is being completely fabricated by Google.
Yet, to our astonishment, Google and its sycophant worshipers in the forum keep telling Natural News, essentially, that “we know” the issue but we’re refusing to resolve it for some reason.
Yes, Google’s apologists are now pushing a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims Natural News wants to be banned from Google… all while calling Natural News writers “conspiracy theorists.” It doesn’t get any funnier (or just flat-out stupid).
Not only are they blacklisting our entire website, they’re also calling us liars in a public forum, all while refusing to tell us what issue needs to be “fixed.” First they blacklist you, then their cult followers call you a liar and defame you, then they call YOU the conspiracy theorist. This is how Google and its ecosystem of techno-fascists operates. It’s sick, demented and predatory.
When we asked Google’s technical guru in the forum what the issue was, he refused to tell us. The message from Google is, essentially, “You’re GUILTY, but we can’t tell you why, and we won’t show you the evidence.” It turns out no one else can find the evidence, either.
Massive Backlash Against Google Keeps Accelerating
In a post in the Google forums (link below) entitled “Google about to witness an exodus of fed-up lovers of freedom and life,” Daniel Dale asks:
"Do Google execs realize that by acting against free speech and expression through their de-listing of people like Mike Adams, they will get serious blowback in the form of an exodus of former customers disgusted by their treachery and for aligning themselves with the forces of evil, contrary to their sadly inappropriate and misleading “Do no evil” tagline?"
Another person denounces Google’s extreme censorship against Natural News:
"Bring back naturalnews searches google. De-listing just proved to me that you and the globalists are desperate to silence those that don’t go along with your agenda. How childish! Get out of the school yard."
Another user, eastvale22 says:
"Hey there Google – been using you for quite a few years now. We’ve heard that you guys have crossed a major line in the free-speech /first amendment area, by deleting a bunch of Natural News’ helpful pages and information.
This kind of action is unacceptable, and will not be tolerated. Our family will be boycotting your company and using other means until this is rectified.
We appreciate your services, but you are most definitely not irreplaceable.
Thank you, and we hope to soon hear of a reversal of this ridiculous and highly inappropriate action. This kind of activity it is communistic and reeks of 1984/big brother.”
Google to Natural News: You’re Guilty, But We Refuse to Tell You Why… Good Luck Figuring it Out!
With this unjustified blacklisting of the entire Natural News website, Google has become a monopolistic, tyrannical regime that can essentially charge every webmaster with a “crime,” banish your entire website without warning, refuse to tell you what you’re “charged” with, refuse to provide any “evidence” against you, refuse to provide you with any meaningful channel for recourse and refuse to even describe their own process for how they claim they’ve flagged your website for something.
There’s not even any tool available for a webmaster to reproduce the issue they claim to be citing. It’s all a “black box” that Google refuses to explain or reveal.
To date, Google has provided Natural News with a grand total of ONE URL which they claim somehow violates their guidelines. That URL, in case you’re curious and want to look at the source code, is here.
It’s an article about bentonite clay, written by a blogger named “Yogi Mama.” Gosh, “Yogi Mama” sounds really, really dangerous. Better ban her articles from public debate, especially given that she’s writing about… OMG… wait for it… CLAY!
For the record, this page used to have a third party ad which was included by the author. Because we originally thought perhaps that third party ad might have been the issue Google didn’t like, we removed days ago.
But Google has not restored Natural News in its index, indicating that Google is still not satisfied in some way… but they refuse to tell us what, how or why.
Part of Google’s official murky explanation on all this is the claim that “Sneaky mobile redirects can be extremely frustrating to users.” But as Matt S.J. posts in response, calling out Google’s insane censoring of Natural News:
"Give me a break! Google monopoly is frustrating to users. Sneaky deindexing of 140k pages or at least 140,000,000 written words past 10 years can be extremely frustrating to writers. Google ads are frustrating to users. Getting into people’s privacy is frustrating to users. Destroying organic results is frustrating to SEOs. Shutting down Google Keyword Planner FREE access is frustrating to SEOs. Lying is frustrating to people."
Natural News isn’t the one being “sneaky” in all this… it’s Google!
Nobody in the Entire Google Products Webmaster Forum Can Find the Answer, Either
Here’s the message I posted to the Google Products Webmaster Forum, which by the way is infested with some of the most vile Google sycophants imaginable. There’s an entire CULT of “Google suck-ups” who bow down to Google like a King, afraid to ask real questions or demand real answers from Google.
It’s like a quivering cult of pathetic snowflakes who are all so afraid of being penalized by Google that they dare not speak the truth about anything. STUNNING…
(And yet there are also a few rational people in the forum who are also defending Natural News and asking reasonable questions about all this, to their credit. Everyone is baffled as to why NaturalNews.com would be singled out in all this…)
Here’s a carbon copy of what I posted in the forum. Notably, as of this writing there has not been a single answer from Google or anyone else that resolves the very simple questions I’ve posed here. See the entire forum discussion at this link, including Google’s empty responses and the vile haters who ridicule natural medicine and hate Natural News.
"Hello all, this is Mike Adams, the editor of NaturalNews.com, the subject of this thread.
I very much appreciate all the thoughtful comments and I want to clarify several things. Yes, we are 100% attempting to comply with Google’s requests but it is truly a black box.
Any assertion here that implies we already know what code is offending Google but “refuse to remove it” is flatly false. We have already removed the third party ad code from the old pages of our blogs. subdomain which we were led to believe was what Google flagged, yet now JohnMu appears to be saying that this is not sufficient in some way (but he won’t email us directly with any further details).
What we are dealing with here is a situation where Google has delisted 10+ years of our content without warning, has not told us what code flagged such action, has not given any more than a single URL, has not provided any tool by which webmasters could audit their sites to reproduce whatever Google is flagging, yet still implies that we should somehow know what offending code is being used to justify the extremely heavy handed action that Google is taking against our entire domain (root + subdomains).
At the same time, as we’ve clearly established in our articles on NaturalNews.com, other prominent news sites that appears to be engaged in violation behavior are not being subjected to the same heavy-handed delisting that Google selectively applied to Natural News.
I dare say that ANY webmaster experiencing this catch-22 situation of Google saying “we are turning off your entire website but won’t tell you why and good luck finding the problem yourself” would be extremely frustrated, if not downright angry.
I have emailed JohnMu multiple times and simply asked for further details on what Google is flagging and how we can comply. I have not received a reply so far. I’ve had multiple site code analysts and SEO analysts also tell me that cannot determine what else would possibly justify Google delisting the entire domain.
Thousands of observers have also poured through page source code and have found only very minor issues but nothing that would explain this action by Google.
My simple assertion to Google is this: Why not simply TELL US (privately, if you wish) what issue is flagging this? JohnMu has my direct email. We will gladly comply, but we cannot comply with a mysterious, unknown, black box requirement that is not identified.
Every rational person should agree that Google has placed us in a Catch-22 situation, essentially saying, “Your entire website is blacklisted, but we won’t tell you why.” It seems absurd, especially given that we have consistently acted in good faith to attempt to resolve whatever issues Google has identified.
There is not a shred of evidence of any willful, malicious, large scale violation of webmaster guidelines anywhere on our site. No one has even alleged that.
I’ve read this entire thread, and I would ask each rational person here, regardless of whether you are pro-NN or anti-NN, wouldn’t you agree that Google should at least give us an opportunity to address the issue they don’t like before de-listing the entire website?
This even even more true given that NN has never engaged in any sort of black hat SEO tactics or deliberate tricks of any kind, as is clearly evidenced by all the source code cache going back for many years.
As user webatronics has said here:
From JohnMu: “Just because the same code snippet was found, doesn’t mean the same behavior was shown (the logic isn’t in the code snippet embedded on the page).”
If that’s the case, then what tests are being used to determine the existence of the offending behavior on a page if the logic isn’t in the code snippet?
Are these automated tests and who interprets the results?
How often are such tests performed on web site?
Are there tools available that webmasters can use to crawl their own site to determine in advance that they have a problem?
Finally, if anyone in this thread would be kind enough to actually identify what Google finds offensive, we would not only be grateful; we would immediately take steps to resolve the issue.
But frankly, until Google does the rational thing and steps up by identifying the “sneaky offending” code, I’m sticking with my position that we are being selectively targeted by Google for extreme censorship, and it is Google that is being SNEAKY about all this. It’s like we are being charged with a crime but you have no right to know what the charge is, nor defend against it, nor even see the evidence against you.
The whole thing is absurd and wildly dishonest on Google’s part, in my opinion.
I haven’t heard from a single person who can even reproduce the so-called “sneaky mobile redirect” Google is even talking about? Has ANYONE reproduced it?
Anyone?"
To date, there still is no reply from Google, no naming of the supposed “violation,” and to my knowledge there isn’t a single person who has been able to reproduce this “sneaky mobile redirects” issue on any NaturalNews.com web page.
In other words, Google’s webmaster guidelines system is a black box of total bullshit.
Calling Bullshit on Google and its Murky “Black Box” Censorship Schemes
I’m calling bulls##t on Google. I think it’s pretty obvious to every intelligent person at this point they made all this up as an excuse to blacklist Natural News, and now they can’t even provide even a single shred of “evidence” against us.
So my demand to Google is simple: Either show us the “evidence” you claim Natural News violated, or restore NaturalNews.com and issue a public apology for targeting us without cause.
Even better, improve your “Manual Actions” communications policies so that webmasters that you claim are in “violation” can determine what issue is being flagged. This ridiculous narrative of “you’re in violation but we won’t tell you why” is really just an excuse for Google to censor whatever websites it doesn’t like.
Join the revolt against Google. #BoycottGoogle and sign the White House petition now. Share this story everywhere, since nobody can find it on Google, obviously.
Heightened Attacks On Alternative Media: Infowars And Natural News Under Attack, Blacklisted February 26 2017 | From: JonRappoport / NaturalNews / Various Alex Jones’ infowars.com and Mike Adams’ naturalnews.com are both under attack.
The Empire is striking back. This isn’t debate or discussion or even baseless accusation. This is war by attrition. And censorship.
This is part of the elite mantra: if we don’t like it, wipe it out.
If you’ve been awake for the past year, you’ve seen an escalation, along many fronts, of the so-called “Progressive” forces to censor what they don’t want to read or hear. It’s taken a new turn. They want to take down key independent media outlets.
Standing Ovation: NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre Calls Out "Fake News" CNN
They want to narrow down the “information superhighway” to a one-lane road that runs directly into their headquarters, where all the big-time fake news is dispensed, every day, to the hypnotized masses.
Don’t let them win. At the very least, take the independent news you judge is vitally important and spread it out far and wide.
Finally, for now, a message to those individuals who, by work and sweat and intelligence, by their own efforts, have built and created independent news sites:
WHATEVER DIFFERENCES YOU MAY HAVE HAD, FROM TIME TO TIME, WITH ONE ANOTHER, THIS IS BIGGER THAN THAT. MUCH BIGGER. THIS IS ABOUT CENSORSHIP OF FREE SPEECH. THIS IS ABOUT A WAR AGAINST THE FREEDOMS WE HOLD DEAR, THE FREEDOMS THAT MEAN THE MOST WHEN THEY ARE UNDER ATTACK. DEFEND EACH OTHER.
Google Blacklists Natural News, Removes 140,000 Pages From Its Index - “Memory Holes”: Natural News Investigative Articles On Vaccines, Pharma Corruption, Fraudulent Science And More
Instead of giving in to the enemy, I refused to take the bait and went public with details of the threat, warning everyone in the new media that sinister forces were now being pursued to undermine and silence every anti-establishment (and pro-Trump) voice on the internet.
NEW: Sign this White House petition NOW to halt Google’s outrageous censorship of Natural News, InfoWars and other independent media publishers.
True to form, today the entire Natural News website has been blacklisted by Google, entirely without warning.
This is just one of many censorship events that have all taken place over the last few days:
Last weekend, damning videos were leaked in a focused effort to take out Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart News editor and gay conservative who has openly supported President Trump. Milo was hit with an attack wave of “opposition research” and was forced to resign from Breitbart on Monday, citing the “cynical media witch hunt” that brought him down.
Yesterday, InfoWars was blackballed by AdRoll.com, an online advertising distribution company. According to Alex Jones, the blacklisting by AdRoll will cost InfoWars $3 million in annual revenues, possibly causing InfoWars to abandon plans of opening a Washington D.C. bureau to cover the Trump administration with real news (instead of the fake news from CNN and elsewhere).
The Shopify e-commerce platform was aggressively threatened by organized Leftists to dump the Breitbart online store and thereby deny revenues to Breitbart. Shopify’s CEO refused to kow-tow to the intimidation and censorship and has maintained a “neutral” position on political issues, focusing on running e-commerce platforms for everyone.
Today, Natural News has been hit by Google, which has blacklisted the entire Natural News domain and removed over 140,000 pages from its index. The take down of Natural News happened this morning, and it follows a pattern of censorship we’re seeing being leveled against other pro-Trump websites.
Google sent no warning whatsoever to our “webmaster tools” email address on file with them. The shut off of Natural News was clearly driven by a human decision, not an algorithm. We’re currently attempting to determine Google’s claimed justification for censoring our entire website, and we hope to have NaturalNews.com restored in Google’s index.
Apparently, Google believes the public should no longer have access to these investigative journalism articles… and 139,997 more articles that cover activism, science frauds, drug industry criminality, political corruption and more.
You are witnessing a modern-day book burning by the internet Gestapo that now decides what knowledge you’re never allowed to access… especially because much of that knowledge can help set humanity free.
I describe it in more detail in this podcast: (article continues below)
Silencing Natural News is all Part of the Globalist “Script” for the Enslavement of a Population Kept Ignorant of Reality
Natural News is, of course, one of the world’s top educational and activism sources exposing the lies of dangerous medicine, toxic mercury in vaccines, the corporate-quack science behind GMOs, cancer industry fraud and so on.
By providing truthful, empowering and passionate information to the public, we harm the profit model of the corrupt medical cartels that fund the media, lobby the government and influence internet gatekeepers with advertising money. (Google has already declared war on natural medicine and nutritional supplements, all but banning them from being advertised on Google Adsense.)
The removal of Natural News from Google’s index means that millions of people may now be unnecessarily harmed by toxic medicines, herbicides and brain-damaging mercury in vaccines because they are being denied the “other side of the story” that’s censored by the corporate-controlled media.
In effect, censorship of Natural News is part of the establishment’s war on humanity which includes depopulation measures (Bill Gates), covert infertility vaccines, corporate-run media disinfo campaigns and a full-on assault against scientific truth and free speech conducted in the public interest.
With the attacks on Milo, InfoWars and Natural News, what you are witnessing right now is the coordinated silencing of every voice that opposes the corrupt, globalist establishment. All such voices are being “memory holed” in the run-up to an attempted Orwellian-style domination over all information run by Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and other internet gatekeepers.
This is all by design. It is nefarious, sinister and represents nothing less than the final desperate assault to enslave humanity by silencing truth.
Targeted by Anti-Trump Globalists
It’s clear to me that Natural News is being targeted primarily because of our support for President Trump and his review of vaccine safety.
It is now apparent that any person who engages in real science, critical thinking or any attempt to protect children from the brain damaging effects of mercury in vaccines is going to be silenced, discredited, smeared and blacklisted.
This is an astonishing realization about the depths of total corruption in society today and how the medical cartels control information to maximize their profits off human suffering.
Note that if I had agreed to betray my colleagues and agree to participate in a smear campaign against Alex Jones, everything would have been fine with Natural News and you wouldn’t see the attacks being waged against us.
The tactic now being pursued by the establishment is, “Join the Dark Side or be destroyed.”
I won’t ever join the Dark Side, which means I will be silenced. The message from Google and other information gatekeepers is now clear: Obediently conform to the status quo or you will be banished from the digital realm.
This is, in essence, nothing less than a modern-day book burning by anti-human globalists who are determined to keep humanity ignorant (and diseased).
The Sheeple are all slated to be sacrificed upon the altar of Big Pharma profits, and anyone who dares stand in their way will be eliminated by any means necessary.
What You Can Do to Fight This Brazen Censorship And Assault Being Waged Against Humanity
First off, stop using anti-truth internet gatekeepers like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter. They are quietly controlling your thoughts, ideas and beliefs by limiting your access to valuable resources like Natural News.
Second, use GoodGopher.com as your search engine, as it provides you with uncensored search results from thousands of independent media websites (many of which are banned or penalized by Google).
Third, bookmark NaturalNews.com in your browser and check it at least twice daily (we post new content each morning and each evening). Manually type it into your browser if you have to. From now on, never rely on some other gatekeeper to bring you to Natural News, because those gatekeepers are censoring all our content.
Be sure to also sign up to our email newsletter. This email newsletter is one of the best ways we can reach you without being filtered out by other sources. As you might expect, Gmail censors our newsletters too, so don’t use a Gmail email address. (Yes, the censorship is an all-out assault.)
Finally, make Censored.news a primary resource to watch for breaking news on important events that are being censored by the fake news media (CNN, WashPo, NYT, etc.).
Finally, prepare for total war on humanity. I’m being told from other sources that the “final solution” is coming soon from the globalists, and it’s going to be unleashed as an all-out war against Trump, liberty, free speech, natural medicine and every individual who dares stand up and speak the truth against the lying globalists and their fake news minions.
The reason they are silencing Natural News, InfoWars and other outlets is because they are preparing for a very big false flag assault and they don’t want independent media websites to be able to counter the “official” news narrative.
I’m serious. Get ready. It’s all coming down soon.
5G Network Being Pushed On The Public With Zero Concern For Safety February 23 2017 | From: DCClothesline / Various The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is pushing to streamline the approval of 5G cell towers, overriding the little regulation that exists to legalize use of experimental high frequencies without extensive safety testing.
Untested frequencies in the range of 28 gigahertz to 100 Ghz or more are set to be deployed all around us without our consent, emanating from an even greater number of new, smaller cell towers. [While this is an American story - it is universally applicable these days as this technology is in virtually every country.]
“US FCC wants to “streamline” the approval process for DAS (Distributed Antenna System) 4G/5G ubiquitous cell towers by exempting them from the 1996 Telecommunications Act!
And the US Senate will imminently be voting on S.19 and S.88, to expand DAS 4G/5G deployment!
If such efforts succeed, millions of small cell towers (on existing light poles/utility poles, or new ones) will be deployed everywhere, throughout residential neighborhoods. The millimeter microwave radiation deployed will produce horrific health effects, worsening EVERYONE’s health, and will remove the remaining pollinators.
It’s THAT serious. The bees in particular will die off rapidly, per studies of bees and microwave radiation.”
“In essence, 5G will be the mobile networks, often referred to as cell phone towers, that power wireless technology. But get this: As we’re expected to start shifting toward 5G technology around the early 2020s, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says we can expect to see a lot more of those mobile towers.
So while we may enjoy anywhere from 10 to 50 times faster connection speeds that help fuel better data consumption, we may in return get millions of new cell phone towers on our street corners. (Our current 4G LTE technology relies on about 200,000 cell phone towers around the U.S.)
But 5G needs a much denser network, meaning many more cell towers of all sizes all over the place. (3) The fact that these things have never been proven safe - and that worrisome science is cropping up around wireless technology — is cause for concern.
And it seems this 5G plan is full speed ahead. On July 14, 2016, the FCC voted to approve Spectrum Frontiers, making the U.S. the first country in the world to open up higher-frequency millimeter wave spectrum for the development of 5G fifth-generation wireless cellular technology. Environmental Health Trust is voicing concerns because health, safety and environmental evaluations to understand the impact on humans, wildlife and the environment have not been done.
In fact, before the FCC gave 5G the green light, the agency was flooded with comments in opposition to 5G.”
For background on 5G, watch this video from Take Back Your Power, featuring Tom Wheeler, Former FCC Chairman and corporate lobbyist, who delivers a rather intimidating and presumptuous speech praising this new technology.
FCC: Intimidating Press, Suppressing Science at "5G" Announcement
Is there a clandestine force working behind the scenes in the United States, censoring truth about the "5G" rollout? Watch this - then decide.
The dangers of certain new technologies, as is the case with some biotech and toxic foods, represent a much more insidious reality: cancer causing, body disrupting frequencies.
The attitude of such technological innovators is perfectly represented in by Tom Wheeler’s statements, pushing for American exceptionalism, demanding 5G deployment as soon as possible with little to no testing of the effects on human beings or the natural environment.
He says billions of dollars are ‘damn important,’ with the part mentioning billions of dollars mysteriously absent from the speech’s official transcsript.
“If the Commission approves my proposal next month, the United States will be the first country in the world to open up high-band spectrum for 5G networks and applications. And that’s damn important because it means U.S. companies will be first out of the gate.”
At events like this, people reasonably approaching the notion of danger are ostracized, while lobbyists like Tom Wheeler condescendingly say things like “talk to the medical people,” in response to genuine concerns.
The FCC is just like the FDA, CDC, NIH, or EPA: regulatory bodies in bed with the very corporations they claims to be regulating. Companies such as IBM, Verizon and AT&T often wield greater power than government, often working directly with government to create their own rules.
For a deeper insight into the mainstream narrative of the splendors of cell technologies , this video is a sales pitch for the road 1G to 5G.
From 1G to 4G & Towards 5G - Evolution Of Communication
This is the 2nd part of the series Evolution of communication. Part one is here.
We’re already being steered in this direction, forced into a future of smart devices and the internet of things, and it could get so much worse from here. How many rising illnesses, how many symptoms, how many cases of salivary gland cancer, brain cancer, and EMF hypersensitivity will we discover along the way?
As Kevin Mottus said in the above video from Take Back Your Power, we need to fight this with much more persistence.
See the following links for information on the effects of cell technologies, as well as info on what you can do to protect yourself.
“Below is what I call my List of Irrefutability. We can soon reach a turning point, but our voices are each needed at this time. Please quote from and or share these links:”
The Stakes For Trump And All Of Us + Facebook's Zuckerberg Lobbies For New World Order February 22 2017 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / WND / Various We need to understand, and so does President Trump, that the hoax “war on terror” was used to transform intelligence agencies, such as the NSA and CIA, and criminal investigative agencies, such as the FBI, into Gestapo secret police agencies.
Trump is now threatened by these agencies, because he rejects the neoconservative’s agenda of US world hegemony that supports the gigantic military/security annual budget.
Our secret police agencies are busy at work planting “intelligence” among the presstitute media that Trump is compromised by “Russian connections” and is a security threat to the United States. The plan is to make a case in the media, as was done against President Nixon, and to force Trump from office.
To openly take on a newly elected president is an act of extraordinary audacity that implies enormous confidence, or else desperation, on the part of the police state agencies.
Here you can see CNN openly cooperating with the CIA in treating wild and irresponsible speculation that Trump is under Russian influence as if it is an established fact.
The “evidence” provided by CNN and the CIA is a “report” by the New York Times that, with little doubt, was planted in the NYT by the CIA.
This is so obvious that it is clear that CNN and the CIA regard the American people as so gullible as to be completely stupid.
Glenn Greenwald explains to Amy Goodman that the CIA is after Trump, because Trump’s announced policy of reducing the dangerous tensions with Russia conflicts with the military/security complex’s need for a major enemy.
The deep state, although there’s no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they’re barely subject to democratic accountability, if they’re subject to it at all.
It’s agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world’s worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads.
This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart from - in fact, in opposition to - the political officials to whom they’re supposed to be subordinate.
And you go - this is not just about Russia. You go all the way back to the campaign, and what you saw was that leading members of the intelligence community, including Mike Morell, who was the acting CIA chief under President Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and the NSA under George W. Bush, were very outspoken supporters of Hillary Clinton.
Russia - 'Source of Truth Against NWO'
On February 10, Russia celebrated the "Day of the Diplomatic worker" - a job which is becoming increasingly dangerous due to Russia's counterweight role in the established world order.
Special remembrance was paid to Karlov, Russia's Ambassador to Turkey who was cowardly shot in a back earlier this year. Furthermore, it was stipulated that Russia is increasingly being looked to as a source of truth, as the world learns more and more about the interconnected nature of Zio-Atlanticist politics and the corrupted mainstream media - often owned by the very same, pillaging political elites.
In fact, Michael Morell went to The New York Times, and Michael Hayden went to The Washington Post, during the campaign to praise Hillary Clinton and to say that Donald Trump had become a recruit of Russia.
The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton’s policies better than they liked Donald Trump’s.
One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime.
Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians.
Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view. He said we shouldn’t care who rules Syria; we should allow the Russians, and even help the Russians, kill ISIS and al-Qaeda and other people in Syria.
So, Trump’s agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted. Clinton’s was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her.
And so, they’ve been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him.
There’s claims that they’re withholding information from him, on the grounds that they don’t think he should have it and can be trusted with it. They are empowering themselves to enact policy.
“Now, I happen to think that the Trump presidency is extremely dangerous. You just listed off in your news - in your newscast that led the show, many reasons.
[ Comment: This is erroneous and based on a lack of information - Greenwald is smart in many ways - however he is NOT playing with all of the pieces. When he is right he is on the money - when he is wrong he is a stroppy kindergarten child ]
They want to dismantle the environment. They want to eliminate the safety net. They want to empower billionaires. They want to enact bigoted policies against Muslims and immigrants and so many others. And it is important to resist them.
And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels.
That isn’t what this resistance is now doing. What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that.
Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody.
They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it.
And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.”
- Glenn Greenwald
The United States is now in the extraordinary situation that the liberal/progressive/left is allied with the deep state against democracy. The liberal/progressive/left are lobbying for the impeachment of a president who has committed no impeachable offense.
The neoconservatives have stated their preference for a deep state coup against democracy. The media obliges with a constant barrage of lies, innuendos and disinformation. The insouciant American public sits there sucking its thumb.
What can Trump do? He can clean out the intelligence agencies and terminate their license granted by Bush and Obama to conduct unconstitutional activities.
He can use anti-trust to breakup the media conglomerates that Clinton allowed to form.
Alex Jones talks with Mark Dice about how is combating the FakeStream media and forcing them to retract their lies.
If Bush and Obama can on their own authority subject US citizens to indefinite detention without due process and if Obama can murder suspect US citizens without due process of law, Trump can use anti-trust law to break up the media conglomerates that speak with one voice against him.
At this point Trump has no alternative but to fight. He can take down the secret police agencies and the presstitute media conglomerates, or they will take him down. Dismissing Flynn was the worse thing to do. He should have kept Flynn and fired the “leakers” who are actively using disinformation against him.
The NSA would have to know who the leakers are. Trump should clean out the corrupt NSA management and install officials who will identify the leakers. Then Trump should prosecute the leakers to the full extent of the law.
No president can survive secret police agencies determined to destroy him. If Trump’s advisers don’t know this, Trump desperately needs new advisers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, wrote in a 5,800-word manifesto his personal vision of recreating the world in his image – an image that includes a true “global community that works for all of us,” he said, in an interview with the Associated Press.
The piece, entitled “Building Global Community,” comes as President Donald Trump’s “make America great again” mantra fueled him to the White House.
It also comes on the heels of Brexit, another vote that seemed to underscore a backlash against elite governance and establishment political policies that place the world’s interest above those of a sovereign nation or individual.
Zuckerberg’s full letter was posted on Facebook It read, in part:
“On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?
History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers - from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global - like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.
Our greatest challenges also need global responses - like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.
This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.”
Zuckerberg then spoke of the need to build supportive, safe, informed, civically-engaged and inclusive communities.
He wondered: “How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures, nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?”
He then addressed each point in its own section, citing personal stories of people’s lives and struggles to make his overall point: think global first.
And some of his solutions:
“The most successful physical communities have engaged leaders, and we’ve seen the same with online groups as well. In Berlin, a man named Monis Bukhari runs a group where he personally helps refugees find homes and jobs. Today, Facebook’s tools for group admins are relatively simple. We plan to build more tools to empower community leaders like Monis to run and grow their groups the way they’d like, similar to what we’ve done with Pages.”
“Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community.”
“We noticed some people share stories based on sensational headlines without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational. If you’re more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth content.
We recently started reducing sensationalism in News Feed by taking this into account for pieces of content, and going forward signals like this will identify sensational publishers as well. There are many steps like this we have taken and will keep taking to reduce sensationalism and help build a more informed community.”
“[We should work toward] establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in collective decision-making. … In the United States election last year, we helped more than 2 million people register to vote and then go vote.”
“Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance.”
His summary?
More of the same: More thinking of the global good; less thinking of the individual.
More ‘new world order’ type thinking; less sovereignty and independence.
“I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The Binge Breaker: Silicon Valley Is Addicting Us To Our Phones January 30 2017 | From: TheAtlantic
Tristan Harris believes Silicon Valley is addicting us to our phones. He’s determined to make it stop.
On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called “Honey Bear” and wrote down his pseudonym for the night: “Presence.”
Harris had just arrived at Unplug SF, a “digital detox experiment” held in honor of the National Day of Unplugging, and the organizers had banned real names.
Also outlawed: clocks, “w-talk” (work talk), and “WMDs” (the planners’ loaded shorthand for wireless mobile devices). Harris, a slight 32-year-old with copper hair and a tidy beard, surrendered his iPhone, a device he considers so addictive that he’s called it “a slot machine in my pocket.”
He keeps the background set to an image of Scrabble tiles spelling out the words face down, a reminder of the device’s optimal position.
I followed him into a spacious venue packed with nearly 400 people painting faces, filling in coloring books, and wrapping yarn around chopsticks. Despite the cheerful summer-camp atmosphere, the event was a reminder of the binary choice facing smartphone owners, who, according to one study, consult their device 150 times a day:
Leave the WMD on and deal with relentless prompts compelling them to check its screen, or else completely disconnect. “It doesn’t have to be the all-or-nothing choice,” Harris told me after taking in the arts-and-crafts scene. “That’s a design failure.”
Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices.
While some blame our collective tech addiction on personal failings, like weak willpower, Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible.
The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”
“You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.”
In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
A “Hippocratic oath” for software designers would stop the exploitation of people’s psychological vulnerabilities.
Under the auspices of Time Well Spent, Harris is leading a movement to change the fundamentals of software design. He is rallying product designers to adopt a “Hippocratic oath” for software that, he explains, would check the practice of:
“Exposing people’s psychological vulnerabilities” and restore “agency” to users. “There needs to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standards,” he says.
“There is a way to design based not on addiction.”
Joe Edelman - who did much of the research informing Time Well Spent’s vision and is the co-director of a think tank advocating for more-respectful software design - likens Harris to a tech-focused Ralph Nader.
Other people, including Adam Alter, a marketing professor at NYU, have championed theses similar to Harris’s; but according to Josh Elman, a Silicon Valley veteran with the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners, Harris is “the first putting it together in this way” - articulating the problem, its societal cost, and ideas for tackling it.
Elman compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established:
Keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives.
Harris, Elman says, is offering Silicon Valley a chance to reevaluate before more-immersive technology, like virtual reality, pushes us beyond a point of no return.
All this talk of hacking human psychology could sound paranoid, if Harris had not witnessed the manipulation firsthand. Raised in the Bay Area by a single mother employed as an advocate for injured workers, Harris spent his childhood creating simple software for Macintosh computers and writing fan mail to Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple.
He studied computer science at Stanford while interning at Apple, then embarked on a master’s degree at Stanford, where he joined the Persuasive Technology Lab.
Run by the experimental psychologist B. J. Fogg, the lab has earned a cultlike following among entrepreneurs hoping to master Fogg’s principles of “behavior design” - a euphemism for what sometimes amounts to building software that nudges us toward the habits a company seeks to instill. (One of Instagram’s co-founders is an alumnus.)
In Fogg’s course, Harris studied the psychology of behavior change, such as how clicker training for dogs, among other methods of conditioning, can inspire products for people.
For example, rewarding someone with an instantaneous “like” after they post a photo can reinforce the action, and potentially shift it from an occasional to a daily activity.
Harris learned that the most-successful sites and apps hook us by tapping into deep-seated human needs. When LinkedIn launched, for instance, it created a hub-and-spoke icon to visually represent the size of each user’s network.
That triggered people’s innate craving for social approval and, in turn, got them scrambling to connect.
“Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers,” Fogg told me.
Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it’s capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways. And he was troubled that out of 10 sessions in Fogg’s course, only one addressed the ethics of these persuasive tactics. (Fogg says that topic is “woven throughout” the curriculum.)
Harris dropped out of the master’s program to launch a start-up that installed explanatory pop-ups across thousands of sites, including The New York Times’.
It was his first direct exposure to the war being waged for our time, and Harris felt torn between his company’s social mission, which was to spark curiosity by making facts easily accessible, and pressure from publishers to corral users into spending more and more minutes on their sites.
Though Harris insists he steered clear of persuasive tactics, he grew more familiar with how they were applied.
He came to conceive of them as “hijacking techniques” - the digital version of pumping sugar, salt, and fat into junk food in order to induce bingeing.
McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.”
Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize. (Delivering rewards at random has been proved to quickly and strongly reinforce behavior.)
Checking that Facebook friend request will take only a few seconds, we reason, though research shows that when interrupted, people take an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task.
Sites foster a sort of distracted lingering partly by lumping multiple services together. To answer the friend request, we’ll pass by the News Feed, where pictures and auto-play videos seduce us into scrolling through an infinite stream of posts - what Harris calls a “bottomless bowl,” referring to a study that found people eat 73 percent more soup out of self-refilling bowls than out of regular ones, without realizing they’ve consumed extra.
The “friend request” tab will nudge us to add even more contacts by suggesting “people you may know,” and in a split second, our unconscious impulses cause the cycle to continue:
Once we send the friend request, an alert appears on the recipient’s phone in bright red - a “trigger” color, Harris says, more likely than some other hues to make people click - and because seeing our name taps into a hardwired sense of social obligation, she will drop everything to answer.
In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.”
A Facebook spokesperson told me the social network focuses on maximizing the quality of the experience - not the time its users spend on the site - and surveys its users daily to gauge success.
In response to this feedback, Facebook recently tweaked its News Feed algorithm to punish clickbait - stories with sensationalist headlines designed to attract readers. (LinkedIn and Instagram declined requests for comment. Twitter did not reply to multiple queries.)
Even so, a niche group of consultants has emerged to teach companies how to make their services irresistible. One such guru is Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, who has lectured or consulted for firms such as LinkedIn and Instagram.
A blog post he wrote touting the value of variable rewards is titled “Want to Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy.”
While asserting that companies are morally obligated to help those genuinely addicted to their services, Eyal contends that social media merely satisfies our appetite for entertainment in the same way TV or novels do, and that the latest technology tends to get vilified simply because it’s new, but eventually people find balance.
“Saying ‘Don’t use these techniques’ is essentially saying ‘Don’t make your products fun to use.’ That’s silly,” Eyal told me.
“With every new technology, the older generation says ‘Kids these days are using too much of this and too much of that and it’s melting their brains.’ And it turns out that what we’ve always done is to adapt.”
Google acquired Harris’s company in 2011, and he ended up working on Gmail’s Inbox app. (He’s quick to note that while he was there, it was never an explicit goal to increase time spent on Gmail.)
A year into his tenure, Harris grew concerned about the failure to consider how seemingly minor design choices, such as having phones buzz with each new email, would cascade into billions of interruptions. His team dedicated months to fine-tuning the aesthetics of the Gmail app with the aim of building a more “delightful” email experience.
But to him that missed the bigger picture: Instead of trying to improve email, why not ask how email could improve our lives - or, for that matter, whether each design decision was making our lives worse?
Harris gives off a preppy-hippie vibe that allows him to move comfortably between Palo Alto boardrooms and device-free retreats
Six months after attending Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a trip Harris says helped him with:
“Waking up and questioning my own beliefs,” he quietly released “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” a 144-page Google Slides presentation.
In it, he declared, “Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies” - Google, Apple, and Facebook - “had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention … We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.”
Although Harris sent the presentation to just 10 of his closest colleagues, it quickly spread to more than 5,000 Google employees, including then-CEO Larry Page, who discussed it with Harris in a meeting a year later.
“It sparked something,” recalls Mamie Rheingold, a former Google staffer who organized an internal Q&A session with Harris at the company’s headquarters. “He did successfully create a dialogue and open conversation about this in the company.”
Harris parlayed his presentation into a position as product philosopher, which involved researching ways Google could adopt ethical design.
But he says he came up against “inertia.” Product road maps had to be followed, and fixing tools that were obviously broken took precedence over systematically rethinking services. Chris Messina, then a designer at Google, says little changed following the release of Harris’s slides:
“It was one of those things where there’s a lot of head nods, and then people go back to work.”
Harris told me some colleagues misinterpreted his message, thinking that he was proposing banning people from social media, or that the solution was simply sending fewer notifications. (Google declined to comment.)
Harris left the company last December to push for change more widely, buoyed by a growing network of supporters that includes the MIT professor Sherry Turkle; Meetup’s CEO, Scott Heiferman; and Justin Rosenstein, a co-inventor of the “like” button; along with fed-up users and concerned employees across the industry.
“Pretty much every big company that’s manipulating users has been very interested in our work,” says Joe Edelman, who has spent the past five years trading ideas and leading workshops with Harris.
Through Time Well Spent, his advocacy group, Harris hopes to mobilize support for what he likens to an organic-food movement, but for software: an alternative built around core values, chief of which is helping us spend our time well, instead of demanding more of it.
Thus far, Time Well Spent is more a label for his crusade - and a vision he hopes others will embrace - than a full-blown organization. (Harris, its sole employee, self-funds it.)
Yet he’s amassed a network of volunteers keen to get involved, thanks in part to his frequent cameos on the thought-leader speaker circuit, including talks at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; the O’Reilly Design Conference; an internal meeting of Facebook designers; and a TEDx event, whose video has been viewed more than 1 million times online.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and an early web pioneer, told me Harris’s ideas are:
“Definitely something that people who are influential are listening to and thinking about.” Even Fogg, who stopped wearing his Apple Watch because its incessant notifications annoyed him, is a fan of Harris’s work:
“It’s a brave thing to do and a hard thing to do.”
At Unplug SF, a burly man calling himself “Haus” enveloped Harris in a bear hug. “This is the antidote!,” Haus cheered. “This is the antivenom!” All evening, I watched people pull Harris aside to say hello, or ask to schedule a meeting. Someone cornered Harris to tell him about his internet “sabbatical,” but Harris cut him off. “For me this is w‑talk,” he protested.
Harris admits that researching the ways our time gets hijacked has made him slightly obsessive about evaluating what counts as “time well spent” in his own life.
The hypnosis class Harris went to before meeting me - because he suspects the passive state we enter while scrolling through feeds is similar to being hypnotized - was not time well spent.
The slow-moving course, he told me, was “low bit rate” - a technical term for data-transfer speeds.
Attending the digital detox? Time very well spent. He was delighted to get swept up in a mass game of rock-paper-scissors, where a series of one-on-one elimination contests culminated in an onstage showdown between “Joe” and “Moonlight.”
Harris has a tendency to immerse himself in a single activity at a time. In conversation, he rarely breaks eye contact and will occasionally rest a hand on his interlocutor’s arm, as if to keep both parties present in the moment.
He got so wrapped up in our chat one afternoon that he attempted to get into an idling Uber that was not an Uber at all, but a car that had paused at a stop sign.
An accordion player and tango dancer in his spare time who pairs plaid shirts with a bracelet that has presence stamped into a silver charm, Harris gives off a preppy-hippie vibe that allows him to move comfortably between Palo Alto boardrooms and device-free retreats.
In that sense, he had a great deal in common with the other Unplug SF attendees, many of whom belong to a new class of tech elites “waking up” to their industry’s unwelcome side effects.
For many entrepreneurs, this epiphany has come with age, children, and the peace of mind of having several million in the bank, says Soren Gordhamer, the creator of Wisdom 2.0, a conference series about maintaining “presence and purpose” in the digital age.
“They feel guilty,” Gordhamer says. “They are realizing they built this thing that’s so addictive.”
I asked Harris whether he felt guilty about having joined Google, which has inserted its technology into our pockets, glasses, watches, and cars.
He didn’t. He acknowledged that some divisions, such as YouTube, benefit from coaxing us to stare at our screens. But he justified his decision to work there with the logic that since Google controls three interfaces through which millions engage with technology - Gmail, Android, and Chrome - the company was the “first line of defense.”
Getting Google to rethink those products, as he’d attempted to do, had the potential to transform our online experience.
Snapchat’s tactics for hooking users may make Facebook’s look quaint.
At a restaurant around the corner from Unplug SF, Harris demonstrated an alternative way of interacting with WMDs, based on his own self-defense tactics.
Certain tips were intuitive: He’s “almost militaristic about turning off notifications” on his iPhone, and he set a custom vibration pattern for text messages, so he can feel the difference between an automated alert and a human’s words.
Other tips drew on Harris’s study of psychology. Since merely glimpsing an app’s icon will -
“Trigger this whole set of sensations and thoughts,” he pruned the first screen of his phone to include only apps, such as Uber and Google Maps, that perform a single function and thus run a low risk of “bottomless bowl–ing.”
He tried to make his phone look minimalist: Taking a cue from a Google experiment that cut employees’ M&M snacking by moving the candy from clear to opaque containers, he buried colorful icons - along with time-sucking apps like Gmail and WhatsApp - inside folders on the second page of his iPhone.
As a result, that screen was practically grayscale. Harris launches apps by using what he calls the phone’s “consciousness filter” - typing Instagram, say, into its search bar - which reduces impulsive tapping.
For similar reasons, Harris keeps a Post-it on his laptop with this instruction: “Do not open without intention.”
His approach seems to have worked. I’m usually quick to be annoyed by friends reaching for their phones, but next to Harris, I felt like an addict. Wary of being judged, I made a point not to check my iPhone unless he checked his first, but he went so long without peeking that I started getting antsy. Harris assured me that I was far from an exception.
“Our generation relies on our phones for our moment-to-moment choices about who we’re hanging out with, what we should be thinking about, who we owe a response to, and what’s important in our lives,” he said.
“And if that’s the thing that you’ll outsource your thoughts to, forget the brain implant. That is the brain implant. You refer to it all the time.”
Curious to hear more about Harris’s plan for tackling manipulative software, I tagged along one morning to his meeting with two entrepreneurs eager to incorporate Time Well Spent values into their start-up.
Harris, flushed from a yoga class, met me at a bakery not far from the “intentional community house” where he lives with a dozen or so housemates.
We were joined by Micha Mikailian and Johnny Chan, the co-founders of an ad blocker, Intently, that replaces advertising with “intentions” reminding people to “Follow Your Bliss” or “Be Present.” Previously, they’d run a marketing and advertising agency.
“One day I was in a meditation practice. I just got the vision for Intently,” said Mikailian, who sported a chunky turquoise bracelet and a man bun.
“It fully aligned with my purpose,” said Chan.
They were interested in learning what it would take to integrate ethical design. Coordinating loosely with Joe Edelman, Harris is developing a code of conduct - the Hippocratic oath for software designers - and a playbook of best practices that can guide start-ups and corporations toward products that “treat people with respect.”
Having companies rethink the metrics by which they measure success would be a start. “You have to imagine: What are the concrete benefits landed in space and in time in a person’s life?,” Harris said, coaching Mikailian and Chan.
Harris hopes that companies will offer a healthier alternative to the current diet of tech junk food - perhaps at a premium price.
At his speaking engagements, Harris has presented prototype products that embody other principles of ethical design. He argues that technology should help us set boundaries.
This could be achieved by, for example, an inbox that asks how much time we want to dedicate to email, then gently reminds us when we’ve exceeded our quota. Technology should give us the ability to see where our time goes, so we can make informed decisions - imagine your phone alerting you when you’ve unlocked it for the 14th time in an hour.
And technology should help us meet our goals, give us control over our relationships, and enable us to disengage without anxiety. Harris has demoed a hypothetical “focus mode” for Gmail that would pause incoming messages until someone has finished concentrating on a task, while allowing interruptions in case of an emergency. (Slack has implemented a similar feature.)
Harris hopes to create a Time Well Spent certification - akin to the leed seal or an organic label - that would designate software made with those values in mind.
He already has a shortlist of apps that he endorses as early exemplars of the ethos, such as Pocket, Calendly, and f.lux, which, respectively, saves articles for future reading, lets people book empty slots on an individual’s calendar to streamline the process of scheduling meetings, and aims to improve sleep quality by adding a pinkish cast to the circadian-rhythm-disrupting blue light of screens. Intently could potentially join this coalition, he volunteered.
As a first step toward identifying other services that could qualify, Harris has experimented with creating software that would capture how many hours someone devotes weekly to each app on her phone, then ask her which ones were worthwhile.
The data could be compiled to create a leaderboard that shames apps that addict but fail to satisfy. Edelman has released a related tool for websites, called Hindsight. “We have to change what it means to win,” Harris says.
The biggest obstacle to incorporating ethical design and “agency” is not technical complexity. According to Harris, it’s a “will thing.” And on that front, even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth.
“This is not the place where people tend to want to slow down and be deliberate about their actions and how their actions impact others,” says Jason Fried, who has spent the past 12 years running Basecamp, a project-management tool.
“They want to make things more sugary and more tasty, and pull you in, and justify billions of dollars of valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars [in] VC funds.”
Rather than dismantling the entire attention economy, Harris hopes that companies will, at the very least, create a healthier alternative to the current diet of tech junk food.
He recognizes that this shift would require reevaluating entrenched business models so success no longer hinges on claiming attention and time.
As with organic vegetables, it’s possible that the first generation of Time Well Spent software might be available at a premium price, to make up for lost advertising dollars.
“Would you pay $7 a month for a version of Facebook that was built entirely to empower you to live your life?,” Harris says. “I think a lot of people would pay for that.”
Like splurging on grass-fed beef, paying for services that are available for free and disconnecting for days (even hours) at a time are luxuries that few but the reasonably well-off can afford.
I asked Harris whether this risked stratifying tech consumption, such that the privileged escape the mental hijacking and everyone else remains subjected to it. “It creates a new inequality. It does.”
Harris admitted. But he countered that if his movement gains steam, broader change could occur, much in the way Walmart now stocks organic produce.
Currently, though, the trend is toward deeper manipulation in ever more sophisticated forms. Harris fears that Snapchat’s tactics for hooking users make Facebook’s look quaint.
Facebook automatically tells a message’s sender when the recipient reads the note - a design choice that, per Fogg’s logic, activates our hardwired sense of social reciprocity and encourages the recipient to respond.
Snapchat ups the ante: Unless the default settings are changed, users are informed the instant a friend begins typing a message to them - which effectively makes it a faux pas not to finish a message you start.
Harris worries that the app’s Snapstreak feature, which displays how many days in a row two friends have snapped each other and rewards their loyalty with an emoji, seems to have been pulled straight from Fogg’s inventory of persuasive tactics.
Research shared with Harris by Emily Weinstein, a Harvard doctoral candidate, shows that Snapstreak is driving some teenagers nuts - to the point that before going on vacation, they give friends their log-in information and beg them to snap in their stead.
“To be honest, it made me sick to my stomach to hear these anecdotes,” Harris told me.
Harris thinks his best shot at improving the status quo is to get users riled up about the ways they’re being manipulated, then create a groundswell of support for technology that respects people’s agency - something akin to the privacy outcry that prodded companies to roll out personal-information protections.
While Harris’s experience at Google convinced him that users must demand change for it to happen, Edelman suggests that the incentive to adapt can originate within the industry, as engineers become reluctant to build products they view as unethical and companies face a brain drain.
The more people recognize the repercussions of tech firms’ persuasive tactics, the more working there “becomes uncool,” he says, a view I heard echoed by others in his field. “You can really burn through engineers hard.”
There is arguably an element of hypocrisy to the enlightened image that Silicon Valley projects, especially with its recent embrace of “mindfulness.”
Companies like Google and Facebook, which have offered mindfulness training and meditation spaces for their employees, position themselves as corporate leaders in this movement.
Yet this emphasis on mindfulness and consciousness, which has extended far beyond the tech world, puts the burden on users to train their focus, without acknowledging that the devices in their hands are engineered to chip away at their concentration.
It’s like telling people to get healthy by exercising more, then offering the choice between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder when they sit down for a meal.
And being aware of software’s seductive power does not mean being immune to its influence.
One evening, just as we were about to part ways for the night, Harris stood talking by his car when his phone flashed with a new text message. He glanced down at the screen and interrupted himself mid-sentence.
“Oh!” he announced, more to his phone than to me, and mumbled something about what a coincidence it was that the person texting him knew his friend. He looked back up sheepishly. “That’s a great example,” he said, waving his phone. “I had no control over the process.”
Former CIA Agent Blows Whistle On Secret Shadow Government January 17 2017 | From: InformationClearingHouse / Various Why don’t more “whistle blowers” come out to expose illegal or unconstitutional secret government operations? If these activities are so illegal, why are people not coming forward to report them?
Over the last fifty years US government intelligence agencies have perfected a complex, sequential system to systematically silence or destroy any employee, including his or her family, who attempts to reveal illegal or unconstitutional activities conducted as part of secret government operations.
As a condition of employment, military and intelligence employees recruited for secret operations are required to sign a “secrecy agreement,” or “nondisclosure agreement,” before being given access to the position, which offers high pay and status in the organization.
This agreement threatens civil and criminal penalties if the employee reveals ANY information regarding the program. Thinking the agreement will only be used for legal purposes and will get them the coveted job, all employees eagerly sign it.
This secrecy agreement was originally designed to protect legitimate classified information, to protect military personnel during wartime and protect legitimate national defense information and technology.
However, because of the binding power of the agreement, government agencies began using it as a powerful tool to silence federal employees who question the legality of certain government operations. It was the perfect tool to threaten, silence or jail any whistle blower who dared to challenge the secret operations of government.
Today, the secrecy agreement is routinely used as an efficient weapon to intimidate or silence employees. Annual refresher briefings are given to remind employees of the penalties for violating the agreement.
These penalties include huge fines, termination, financial ruin and even prison – all of which mean the destruction of their lives and their families.
Most will not reveal any wrongdoing, no matter how egregious, for fear of calculated, severe retribution.
When employees sign the secrecy agreement and are cleared for classified programs, they are not told they are giving up their right to a jury trial, or to sue the agency that hired them. If they try to do so as a whistle blower, they find they have no right to be heard in federal court. Many have found this out when their case was denied; then it was too late. That is part of the system.
If the employee attempts to contact their Congressman or Senator, their representative is blocked from receiving any information about their case, because they do not have the necessary “clearance.”
When the employee attempts to blow the whistle to the Congressional intelligence committees, their response is ignored. It is made clear to committee members that they are not to touch such cases, so they refer them back to their Senator or Congressman, who cannot access information involved in their case.
If a courageous employee continues to proceed and blow the whistle, a system of personal and career destruction follows. This begins with promotions being denied, being turned down for sensitive or career enhancing assignments, and their files being flagged, ruining their reputation inside their agency.
At this point their career is over. If they go quietly, the retribution stops.
When the employee still continues their effort to report the information, their travel records, personnel records, medical records and security records are searched for mistakes or damaging information that can be used to threaten them with termination.
Their telephones and computers are monitored searching for incriminating information. If no substantive information can be found, it is fabricated and placed in their file.
Employees who refuse to back down are then subjected to internal “security investigations,” multiple, hostile “interviews,” attempting to get them to recant their information, and multiple polygraph interrogations.
In many cases, the employee is commanded to report to the internal medical office for psychological evaluation. If they comply, the evaluation labels them as paranoid, unstable, or disgruntled. This information is placed in their file and is used later to justify the agency’s action in the event of outside scrutiny.
If the employee contacts a member of the news media, they are immediately cited with violating their secrecy agreement and criminal penalties are filed against them. Several news media outlets are connected to the CIA and NSA and notify them of the employee’s contact.
Finally, the employee is forced to resign after being threatened with termination in kangaroo court meetings where the information fabricated in their files is used against them.
After termination or forced resignation, interest rates on their internal credit union loans are raised to make the payments unaffordable. The release of the employee’s retirement funds needed provide for their family are blocked (a felony). The agency black lists them from gaining employment with other government agencies or contractors, further ruining them financially.
Dehumanized, financially ruined and under severe emotional and mental pressure, the employee’s family begins to break apart. If the family’s foundation is not strong, this results in alcoholism, depression and divorce.
In some cases, it has resulted in the employee committing suicide, the ultimate goal of the program of destruction. This silences the employee permanently, obscuring the agency’s role in their destruction. It is the perfect crime.
Should the employee still have the resolve to endure this program of career and personal destruction and continues to press for release of the information, or if his family members attempt to sue the agency for the illegal activity, classified agencies will invoke the secretive State Secrets Privilege, which orders the employee and his family not to reveal the information or face prison.
If the family’s case reaches federal court, the State Secrets Privilege is invoked and the case is shut down – and sealed. Federal judges rubber stamp the censoring of the case without reviewing the case facts.
Now that the employee’s case, and in some cases their family’s case, is shut down and under seal, citing “national security,” the process of silencing the employee is complete. Many are never heard from again, fearing prison if they talk to anyone, including an attorney.
Using attractive awards of multi-million dollar contracts, the US government military industrial complex convinces private corporations that their employees must be cleared and sign secrecy agreements.
This includes employees at all levels, from secretaries to CEOs. Once they have signed the secrecy agreement, they are bound to keep all information, including potentially illegal information, quiet, being threatened with the same penalties.
To date, over five million Americans have been required to sign this secrecy agreement and now fall under the shadow of the State Secrets Privilege.
Only a few federal employees have made it through this systematic process of destruction to reveal what they know about the illegal operation they observed. Sadly, some whistle blowers have died “mysterious” deaths or committed “suicide.”
Employees in intelligence agencies are aware of penalties contained in the secrecy agreement and the huge risk in violating it, even to expose corruption. Most look the other way to protect their careers, retirements and families.
Many have observed the outward signs of the system of personal and career destruction used on others and a culture of fear exists. But, they are not fully aware of all that is being done.
The full scope of the system is only known at the higher levels of the organization and is hidden from employees, until its use is necessary.
This is why we do not see whistle blowers coming out and reporting what they have seen. This system has been used and perfected for over fifty years. It is being used because it works.
It works, unless the system is exposed, the whistle blower knows what is coming and prepares for it, and they are supported by private organizations and individuals dedicated to truth in government.
This support is essential, not only to protect the whistle blower and their family, but also to defend our Constitutional form of government from tyranny.
Facebook Knows A Whole Lot About Your Offline Life + The World's Best Security Engineers Are Working On Flappy Bird January 12 2017 | From: Digg / Inverse Facebook has long let users see all sorts of things the site knows about them, like whether they enjoy soccer, have recently moved, or like Melania Trump.
But the tech giant gives users little indication that it buys far more sensitive data about them, including their income, the types of restaurants they frequent and even how many credit cards are in their wallets.
Since September, ProPublica has been encouraging Facebook users to share the categories of interest that the site has assigned to them. Users showed us everything from "Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations" to "Breastfeeding in Public." In total, we collected more than 52,000 unique attributes that Facebook has used to classify users.
Facebook's site says it gets information about its users "from a few different sources."
What the page doesn't say is that those sources include detailed dossiers obtained from commercial data brokers about users' offline lives. Nor does Facebook show users any of the often remarkably detailed information it gets from those brokers.
When asked this week about the lack of disclosure, Facebook responded that it doesn't tell users about the third-party data because its widely available and was not collected by Facebook.
“Our approach to controls for third-party categories is somewhat different than our approach for Facebook-specific categories," said Steve Satterfield, a Facebook manager of privacy and public policy.
"This is because the data providers we work with generally make their categories available across many different ad platforms, not just on Facebook."
Satterfield said users who don't want that information to be available to Facebook should contact the data brokers directly. He said users can visit a page in Facebook's help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook.
Limiting commercial data brokers' distribution of your personal information is no simple matter. For instance, opting out of Oracle's Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires "sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification" in postal mail to Oracle's chief privacy officer.
Users can ask data brokers to show them the information stored about them. But that can also be complicated. One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of their social security number to obtain their data. Facebook changes its providers from time to time so members would have to regularly visit the help center page to protect their privacy.
One of us actually tried to do what Facebook suggests. While writing a book about privacy in 2013, reporter Julia Angwin tried to opt out from as many data brokers as she could.
Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver's license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers.
ProPublica's experiment to gather Facebook's ad categories from readers was part of our Black Box series, which explores the power of algorithms in our lives. Facebook uses algorithms not only to determine the news and advertisements that it displays to users, but also to categorize its users in tens of thousands of micro-targetable groups.
Our crowd-sourced data showed us that Facebook's categories range from innocuous groupings of people who like southern food to sensitive categories such as "Ethnic Affinity" which categorizes people based on their affinity for African-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic groups. Advertisers can target ads toward a group 2014 or exclude ads from being shown to a particular group.
Last month, after ProPublica bought a Facebook ad in its housing categories that excluded African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, the company said it would build an automated system to help it spot ads that illegally discriminate.
Facebook has been working with data brokers since 2012 when it signed a deal with Datalogix. This prompted Chester, the privacy advocate at the Center for Digital Democracy, to filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Facebook had violated a consent decree with the agency on privacy issues.
The FTC has never publicly responded to that complaint and Facebook subsequently signed deals with five other data brokers.
To find out exactly what type of data Facebook buys from brokers, we downloaded a list of 29,000 categories that the site provides to ad buyers. Nearly 600 of the categories were described as being provided by third-party data brokers. (Most categories were described as being generated by clicking pages or ads on Facebook.)
The categories from commercial data brokers were largely financial, such as "total liquid investible assets $1-$24,999," "People in households that have an estimated household income of between $100K and $125K, or even "Individuals that are frequent transactor at lower cost department or dollar stores."
We compared the data broker categories with the crowd-sourced list of what Facebook tells users about themselves. We found none of the data broker information on any of the tens of the thousands of "interests" that Facebook showed users.
Our tool also allowed users to react to the categories they were placed in as being "wrong," "creepy" or "spot on." The category that received the most votes for "wrong" was "Farmville slots." The category that got the most votes for "creepy" was "Away from family." And the category that was rated most "spot on" was "NPR."
The World's Best Security Engineers Are Working On Flappy Bird
Fewer people want to engage in a modern "spy vs. spy."
Eugene Kaspersky explains hacking like it’s a bank robbery:
“Imagine you visit your bank and there are a thousand people crowding the office,” Kaspersky tells Inverse.
“There are so many of them, you simply can’t get inside. They’re just messing around asking irrelevant questions, shouting, and acting silly. Most workers at the bank won’t be able to serve you or anyone else that day. That’s a DDoS attack."
“Later that night, someone unarms the alarms, breaks into the bank, cracks the vault, and steals all the money. That’s hacking.”
The bank in his metaphor is a server, and hackers in 2016 have had a banner year screwing with them. In October, a chunk of code known as Mirai hijacked thousands of internet-connected devices to launch a record-size DDoS attack.
Together, they spewed access requests at a DNS server - a switchboard for the internet, basically - and brought down some of the biggest sites on the internet: Twitter, Reddit, and Spotify among them. Again, merely an annoyance.
The more sophisticated attack on a server is when hackers - either lone wolves, loose collectives, or state-sponsored snoops - retrieve information from a server and release it to the public to influence public opinion and even sway elections. This scenario should be familiar to everybody by now.
The problem is, there just aren’t enough people smart enough to guard the vaults. Kaspersky would know. He’s a big deal in the world of cybersecurity.
As the founder and CEO of cybersecurity giant Kaspersky Lab, he’s often in the news for spotting security flaws for his clients. He also can’t find enough people to work for him.
Would a healthier cybersecurity industry have stopped the year’s biggest hacks - Wikileaks and DDoS attacks - from being pulled off?
Eugene Kapersky
“Protecting against these two threats requires different skills and different technologies, including the software and hardware needed,” Kaspersky tells Inverse. “To some extent, there’s an overlap of skills simply because IT security people get to learn about both threats.”
But DDoS attacks are ham-fisted and blunt. They don’t do much damage and often don’t keep a website down for long. What’s more dangerous are targeted attacks carried out to destroy machinery or collect information. And there aren’t enough security experts to stop those, either.
Although the United States government still won’t even address it, the destruction of uranium enrichment machinery in Iran in 2009 - the kind that could provide ingredients for a nuclear bomb - is widely seen as an American ploy. The machinery was destroyed after malware infected the program that regulated centrifuges.
It was brilliant, but it spread beyond its target of the Iran nuclear facility.
Eric Chien, an engineer at California-based security company Symantec, helped track how the weaponized code used in Iran known as “Stuxnet” worked. (Kaspersky Lab also analyzed the virus over the course of about two years.)
At a panel after a screening of Zero Days, a documentary about the attack, Chien lamented that the next wave of computer science graduates might be more interested in making freemium apps rather than uncovering international intrigue.
“We go into the office thinking about how we are going to defeat these adversaries.”
“We see a lot of people getting into things like mobile or social, and people are creating Flappy Bird and people are making millions of dollars", Chien said.
“But what we both really love about this job and why we’re super-passionate about this, is it’s unique in some sense. While we have competitors in our business - also creating security products - when we go in the office, we’re not thinking about, ‘Oh, how do we make another dollar? How do we beat our competitor?’
We go into the office thinking about how we are going to defeat these adversaries. How are we going to defeat these actors. And those actors are constantly changing.”
Bruce Schneier, a cyber security expert and author, gets it. “Young engineers might not see security as sexy,” he says. “Which is weird to me, because I think it’s the coolest ever. It’s spy versus spy.”
At a hacking competition at New York University this year, one could find a lot of students who would agree with that sentiment.
One of the annual competitive formats during NYU’s Cyber Security Awareness Week is known as “Capture the Flag,” or CTF, and it attracts the kinds of students who could help fill the computer security talent gap.
This year, students from all over the world competed in a 36-hour marathon, scrolling through endless lines of code to crack security challenges.
“The skills you learn in a CTF are exactly the type of outside-the-box thinking that is required,” says David Kohlbrenner, a Ph.D. student in security and systems at UC San Diego.
He got involved in cybersecurity “purely through CTF,” and is an original member of the Plaid Parliament of Pwning, a dominant CTF team from Carnegie Mellon that won this year’s competition.
“What the companies need are people who can solve a variety of different challenges and can approach them from different angles,” Kohlbrenner tells Inverse.
Kohlbrenner says the Mirai botnet responsible for October’s massive DDoS attack was “honestly trivial to set up,” and a continued dearth of security engineers (and, Schneier argues, a market failure to make the Internet of Things decently secure) could keep it that way in the future.
Click on the image above to open a larger verion in a new window
It’s clear companies need more manpower, whether that’s to ward off DDoS attacks or server hacks. But when it comes to recruiting, Schneier says new technology companies have the upper hand in attracting talented young programmers.
“You don’t want to work for Procter & Gamble,” he says.
"You want to work for Google, or you wanna go work for Facebook, or the next high tech startup,” Schneier says.
Nick Winter, the co-founder of a gamified coding community called CodeCombat, agrees. “No one is thinking, hmm, I’m gonna get a job at an insurance company".
Doesn’t matter if they have all these interesting technological problems to solve and tons of important data to protect. They’re at a huge disadvantage there compared to any start-up in San Francisco or even, like, a tech-focused, big tech company like Cisco.
Both Schneier and Winter’s examples are reminders that it isn’t just tech companies - from router manufacturers to dating apps - that have a lot to lose when security engineers are in short supply.
“All companies become software companies,” Winter says. “And all data becomes more important and mission critical.”
“The findings show a general shortage in full-time security staff and expert talent availability, which calls for the need for more specialists in the field,” reads a press release about the survey results.
It’s up to universities like NYU to prepare students for an ever-changing field, Kaspersky says. Server attacks in the future shouldn’t feel like bank robberies that change elections.
“The job market is changing too fast for the education system,” Kaspersky says.
“Universities are fairly conservative institutions, plus, of course, it takes considerable time to educate people.
We see that there’s a growing number of IT security programs, and more and more people are getting interested in the field, but the job market is expanding faster.”
His advice for young programmers? Learn how to prevent attacks.
“There are many skills that are in deficit that require very focused technical training” Kaspersky says.
“Intrusion detection, development of secure software, digital forensics. All these skills are in high demand, but there are not many folks who have them.”
US Deep State In Deep Trouble + A Deeper Understanding Of Technocracy January 11 2017 | From: Sputnik / JonRappoport US ruling power is in deep trouble because there are growing signs that the mass of citizens are no longer beholden to the supposed authority residing in Washington.
Once the legitimacy of would-be authorities begins to collapse in the eyes of the people, then profound political change is in the offing, as history shows us through countless empires that came and went – often ignominiously.
"The so-called American Deep State comprising the military-intelligence apparatus and its operatives in the political and media establishment has put its credibility on the line over allegations of Russian interference in the US elections."
Those allegations are threadbare, indeed baseless, despite concerted, overweening attempts by the Deep State to conjure up something of substance.
The latest high-level intelligence report from the CIA, NSA, FBI and other US spy agencies on alleged Russian cyber hacking may have “wowed” President Barack Obama, various members of Congress and the corporate-controlled news media. Not so for ordinary Americans. Among rank-and-file citizens the reaction has been underwhelming to say the least.
And that should be a matter of anxiety for the ruling establishment. If the people can no longer be commanded, then the whole foundation for power begins to erode like a sandcastle.
As a New York Times report put it:
"What’s the big deal? asks Trump’s supporters on Russian hacking report”.
Trump is quite a hit in Russia - here he is on sugar packaging in a Russian store
Among ordinary voters far removed from the Washington Beltway Bubble the consensus is one of derision towards the once-revered US intelligence community.
"Sore losers”, “sour grapes”, “crybabies” and “absurd” were just some of the disbelieving responses from ordinary folks about claims that Russian agents directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin had tipped the US November election in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton."
“I don’t believe the [US] intel report,” said one man in Louisiana. “Why is everybody so afraid of Russia? I’m not against Putin.”
Another man, a retired US air force officer, added:
"From the parts of the [US intel] report I’ve seen it seems silly.”
President-elect Trump, once again, seems more in tune with the real, pressing concerns of common citizens.
He emerged from his so-called “briefing” by US intelligence chiefs last Friday and pointedly refused to join the Washington blowhards accusing Russia of “an act of war”.
Trump in fact followed up with a comment that it was only a “stupid” person would not want to have good relations with Russia.
This was not the response that the spooks wanted from Trump. The CIA and their surrogates in the Obama administration, Congress and the media were building up the US intel report like a witch-hunt against anyone who dares to dissent from the allegations of Russian cyber interference.
Unlike warmongering Congress members such as John McCain and Lyndsey Graham, Trump has not jumped on the bandwagon to demonize Russia.
"And the thing is that people beyond the thrall of the Deep State centered in Washington appear to agree with Trump.
At a time of immense social challenges from poverty, unemployment, financial indebtedness, deteriorating infrastructure and public services, and so on, a US policy of hostility towards Russia seems like an alien distraction. A contemptible waste of priority and resources, not to say a reckless drumbeat to war between nuclear powers."
The US intelligence agencies, aided by the Obama White House and mainstream media, tried to muster gravitas to play its “Russian card” against Trump.
But Trump and the popular sentiment out there are not responding in the deferential manner expected by the spooks.
In fact, despite sensationalist headlines in the mainstream media about “Putin ordering an influence campaign to help Trump win the election”, the US intelligence agencies are now in real danger of being exposed as ridiculous liars.
The collapse of the US establishment has been underway for sometime, but lately the momentum has quickened with the election of Trump and the mainstream media’s penchant for “fake narratives”.
Last week the Washington disgraced itself by running a story about Russia hacking into the US electric, a story which was quickly exposed as “fake news”.
On the latest US intel report, as well as Trump and ordinary Americans, many observers from around the world were taken aback by the amateurish dearth of evidence and generally low quality of analysis. Independent cyber security experts, including US-based ones, poured scorn on the claims against Russia.
The US spy agencies claim that they have “supporting evidence” that Russia hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails, but they say, unconvincingly, that they can’t disclose the information in order to protect “sensitive sources and methods”. Such a conjuring trick just makes the US spooks and the subservient news media look even more ridiculous.
A major giveaway was the disproportionately huge focus that the US intelligence report devoted to trying to discredit Russian news media outlets, RT and Sputnik.
If that’s the best that America’s “national security guardians” can come up with then we can be sure their case against Russia is null and void.
There was a time in the American past when shadowy, unelected elites could control society through monopolistic, servile media and servile politicians kowtowing to their supposed authority.
There was also a naive belief among people that the secret services were defending the nation’s best interests.
Not any more alas. People have got wise to the massive manipulation and criminality of such shadowy powers who orchestrate wars and regime changes all around the world for the narrow benefit of elite corporate power.
Ordinary Americans pay with their lives and livelihoods for the machinations of the ruling cabal.
"The Deep State intel chiefs may have been fawned over by Obama, Congress and the media in their outlandish claims of Russian subversion. But growing numbers of ordinary people in the US and around the world can see through the lies and blatant agenda of hostility towards Russia – an insane hostility that only serves the elite interests of the Deep State."
The once feared, and revered, US Deep State is now facing a deep dilemma and maybe even an existential crisis. For it knows deep down that its erstwhile credibility and authority are shot to pieces.
Down through history, the American rulers got away with their charade of inciting wars and conflicts through false flags and contrived catastrophes: the not-so-secret Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the US genocidal war on Vietnam, the dubious 9/11 terror attacks and Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, to mention just a few.
This same warmongering American ruling class want another arms race, Pentagon-pumping Cold War with Russia. But this time they have played a card that is all too evidently blank. The US spooks and their elitist establishment know that Trump, the American people, Russia and the rest of world all know that they have nothing to offer.
No credibility, no morals and no authority, the US Deep State is in deep trouble.
A Deeper Understanding Of Technocracy
Technocracy is the basic agenda and plan for ruling global society from above, so we need to understand it from several angles.
Consider a group of enthusiastic forward-looking engineers in the early 20th century. They work for a company that has a contract to manufacture a locomotive.
This is a highly complex piece of equipment. On one level, workers are required to make the components to spec. Then they must put them all together. These tasks are formidable. On another level, various departments of the company must coordinate their efforts. This is also viewed as a technological job. Organizing is considered a technology.
When the locomotive is finished and delivered, and when it runs on its tracks and pulls a train, a great and inspiring victory is won.
And then…the engineers begin to think about the implications. Suppose the locomotive was society itself? Suppose society was the finished product? Couldn’t society be put together in a coordinated fashion?
And couldn’t the “technology of organizing things” be utilized for the job?
Why bother with endlessly arguing and lying politicians? Why should they be in charge? Isn’t that an obvious losing proposition? Of course it is.
But engineers could lay out and build a future society that would benefit all people. Hunger, disease, and poverty could be wiped out. Eliminating them would be part of the uncompromising blueprint.
This “insight” hit engineers and technicians like a ton of bricks. Of course! All societies had been failures for the same reason: the wrong people were in charge.
Armed with this new understanding, engineers of every stripe began to see what was needed. A revolution in thinking about societal organization. Science was the new king. And science would rule.
Of course, for an engineered world to work, certain decisions would have to be made about the role of the individual. Every individual. You couldn’t have an air-tight plan if every human were free to pursue his own objectives.
Too many variables. Too much confusion. Too much conflict. Well, that problem could be solved. The individual’s actions would be tailored to fit the coordinated operations of the planned society.
The individual would be inserted into a pre-ordained slot. He would be “one of the components of the locomotive.” His life would be connected to other lives to produce an exemplary shape.
Yes, this could imply a few problems, but those problems could be worked out. They would have to be worked out, because the overriding goal was the forming of a world organization.
What would you do if one bolt (an individual human) in one wheel of a locomotive was the wrong size? You would go back and correct the error. You would re-make the bolt.
Among sincere technocrats, the overall vision superseded the glaring problems.
But…other people entered the game. High-echelon Globalists saw technocracy as a system they could use to control the population. Control was their goal. Period. What happened to the individual in the process was of no concern to them. The individual had freedom or he didn’t have freedom, and the Globalists overtly intended to wipe out that freedom.
Erasing hunger, poverty, illness? Nonsense.
For the Globalists, those realities would be exacerbated. Sick, weak, and debilitated people were easier to rule and control and manage.
Essentially, a vastly misguided vision of a future technocratic utopia was hijacked. Something bad was made much worse.
In a nutshell, this is the history of technocracy. A locomotive is a society? No.
That was the first fatally flawed idea. Everything that followed was increasingly psychotic.
Unfortunately, many people in our world believe in Globalism, if you could call a partial vague view a legitimate belief.
They dreamily float on all the propaganda cover stories - greatest good for the greatest number of people; no more poverty; equality of sharing; reducing the carbon footprint; a green economy; “sustainable development”; international cooperation; engineering production and consumption of goods and services for the betterment of everyone; and all of this delivered from a central platform of altruistic guides.
If you track down the specifics that sit under these pronouncements, you discover you discover a warped system of planning that delivers misery and de facto slavery to the global population.
The collective utopia turns out to be a sham. Waking up is hard to do? Breaking up is hard to do? They must be done.
A workable technological fix is a very nice achievement when the project is a machine. But transferring that glow of victory to the whole of society is an illusion. Anything that calls itself education would tackle the illusion as the first order of business.
American Pravda: How The CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories" January 10 2017 | From: UNZ / ActivistPost / Various
With the sudden, bizarre rise of the “Fake News” accusations throughout the entire Corporate Media megaphone and the equally bizarre and totally unsubstantiated CIA allegations that the Russians had stolen the election for Donald Trump, this topic is highly pertinent.
A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own.
This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.
Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers - from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption - could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory” but such words are never applied.
Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.
Put another way, there are good “conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy theories,” with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such.
I’ve sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in the minds of the gullible American public.
The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous “conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association.
In the initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world.
But as the Bush Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch-enemy.
As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center.
By that date I don’t doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in Americawas Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.
Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved.
So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.”
Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines.
The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.
But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier.
Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI.
Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media.
At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims.
Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies.
His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons.
In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses.
His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society.
So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals.
Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.
So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid style” in American politics, which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories.
To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct.
For example, he described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government.
Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called “conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them might possibly be true.
To the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible for some important public event must surely have many separate “moving parts” to it, whether actors or actions taken, let us say numbering at least 100 or more.
Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would still be left in plain sight for investigators to find.
And once the buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed.
Even if not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion that there had indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become established.
However, there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful governmental officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent a source of considerable embarrassment to such individuals.
But I had always assumed that even if government failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began realizing that the media was merely “Our American Pravda” and perhaps had been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic.
If those five - or ten or twenty or fifty - initial clues were simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness, incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected, perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial control of the media is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of control the better.
So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s.
Hence I would argue that the likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil.
Indeed, we are constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that appear to be “false positives,” dire allegations seemingly having little factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous.
Meanwhile, even the crudest sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America’s renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings.
However, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason.
Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine, have somewhat altered this depressing picture.
So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream media organs.
Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished.
Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to “cognitively infiltrate” and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century American intellectual life. But the more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden.
So perhaps Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of “conspiracy theories,” and we should return to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.
False Flag Terrorism: Murdering The Innocent In Order To Support The Lie + 15 Ways To Detect A False Flag Operation January 9 2017 | From: PaulCraigRoberts / ActivistPost / Various
As my readers know, I reported, factually, on the Boston Marathon alleged bombing case. I interviewed carefully the pro bono attorney, John Remington Graham, who intervened in behalf of the Russian aunt, a lawyer in the Russian Federation, in behalf of the falsely convicted younger Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar, the older brother having been murdered by the FBI.
Graham conclusively proved that the FBI’s own evidence proved beyond any doubt that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was innocent, which means so was the older brother.
It is clear beyond reasonable doubt that there was no real bombing at the Boston Marathon and that the alleged terrorist event, using crisis actors, was an orchestration designed to convince dumbshit Americans that they really were under a “Muslim threat.” The entire foreign policy of the United States in the 21st century is based on an orchestrated “Muslim threat.”
The orchestrated threat was also used for a practice exercise in closing down one of America’s largest cities in order to manhunt with intent to kill a young man chosen as the villain for the orchestrated event.
American citizens were forced at gunpoint out of their homes while Homeland Security, a Nazi reminiscent name from the Hitler era, disrupted the life of an entire city and its airport service in behalf of this orchestrated event that murdered American civil liberty.
The entire exercise was based on a lie, an event that never happened, like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and so forth. Just another lie in behalf of the “exceptional people.”
A number of websites have disproved the false case against the Tsarnaev brothers. Attorney John Remington Graham has brought the case to the justice authorities, but the US Department of Justice (sic) has no interest whatsoever in justice.
Now comes forward an attorney, Mary Maxwell with a book. It is available online free. I read the first eight chapters, which was sufficient to comfirm me in my independent conclusion that there was no Boston Marathon bombing by terrorists.
I recommend to you Mary Maxwell’s account. However, I will say that I believe that she uses irony excessively and that on occasions her irony gets in the way of the factual message. Knowing this, stick with it, and read her account.
Irony is the style that she has chosen, and we must respect a person prepared to stand up to the murderous American establishment and to challenge one of the founding myths of the American Police State and Washington’s wars against the world.
Read her book Marathon Bombing - Indicting the Players here.
Any US citizen that believes the falsified case of the Boston Marathon bombing is a dangerous and direct threat to American civil liberty and to the lives of millions of people on planet Earth.
If Americans do not wake up to the orchesrations to which they are subjected, they will forfeit their freedom. The Russians and the Chinese are individually and together more powerful than Washington, and they are not going to put up with the lies with which insouciant Americans are content.
If Americans cannot take back their country from self-serving oligarchs, Americans are doomed.
A false flag formula is becoming readily apparent in the face of so many mass shootings and bombings in the US. The phenomenon has become so commonplace in the last 3 years that it’s becoming more American than apple pie.
According to ShootingTracker.com, there have been 353 mass shootings in the USA for 2015 so far. However, as scary as that number is, the good news is that you don’t have to be afraid of them like you may think. A very large number of them - and all of them with any mass media significance and attention – are false flag staged terror events.
Some have real victims, some do not, but either way, the most criminal of all institutions – the Government – is the orchestrating force behind them.
They are scripted, pre-planned operations which are definitely not the result of random gun violence. Just as Obama stated (by hiding the truth in plain sight), there is a pattern behind these mass shootings. The Controllers are following a definite false flag formula.
Below is a list of the top 15 elements of this formula, which you can now use to detect a false flag operation as it occurs:
False Flag Formula #1: Drill at the Same or Nearby Time and Place
The exercise or drill – at the same time, at the same place – has became the sine qua non or indispensable element of the recent false flag operation. Sometimes there are slight variations on this when the Government plans a drill nearby (a few miles away) rather than at the exact place, or plans a drill earlier on in the day, so it can just coincidentally “go live”.
There was a twist in the case of the recent San Bernardino shooting: the Government planned regular drills in the building where the shooting took place every month! (Think about it – what are the chances of a real mass shooting occurring in a building used for mass shooting drills?)
As Captain Eric H. May, a former US Army military intelligence officer, stated:
“The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out."
What’s the point of having a drill at the same time and place? Here are a few of its purposes:
1. Distract and remove key personnel who would otherwise be at the scene to contain and investigate it;
2. Confuse other personnel who will treat the whole event in a different way if they think it is a drill rather than a real event;
3. Slow down, reduce or eliminate an effective response, especially of police and other law enforcement, given the removal and confusion of personnel;
4. Distract and confuse witnesses, the media and the public in general;
5. Provide a great cover and period of lower defenses and security to carry out an attack, which would otherwise be difficult or impossible if defenses were at their usual or optimal operating level.
False Flag Formula #2: Foreknowledge
Another way you can tell that a mass shooting is a false flag op is if you find proof of foreknowledge of the event. As it so happens, all of the notorious and publicized mass attacks of late have had evidence of foreknowledge. Going way back in time, there was foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 that got the US into World War 2.
False Flag Formula #3: Eyewitnesses Have Conflicting Accounts
You can also spot a likely false flag operation when you see or hear of multiple conflicting witness accounts. In the case of the Aurora Colorado “Batman” mass shooting, eyewitnesses claimed they saw an entire team of shooters, rather than the single shooter James Holmes of the official narrative.
With Sandy Hook, we saw multiple scenes of law enforcement chasing men into the surrounding forest, yet the official narrative declares the only shooter was Adam Lanza. In San Bernardino, too, witnesses stated they saw 3 white athletic men, not the 2 brown husband-and-wife team we were told did the shooting.
Conflicting eyewitness accounts can destroy the official narrative no matter what the detail is. On 9/11, various fireman told us there were bombs in the building, contradicting the official story that planes alone took down the Twin Towers. With Sandy Hook, Gene Rosen’s testimony itself was full of holes and was contradicted by that of the school bus driver and the official report.
False Flag Formula #4: MSM Quickly Name and Demonize the Patsy
Have you ever wondered how quickly the MSM (Mainstream Media) discovers the name of the patsy? They had somehow deduced that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 just hours after the attacks.
Have you ever wondered why the Government is so good at telling us who supposedly executed these attacks right after they happen, with almost no time to investigate, yet can’t seem to manage to actually stop these alleged terror attacks?
Without any evidence, the MSM endlessly repeated “bin Laden” like a crazy mantra after 9/11, despite the fact bin Laden himself denied involvement in the attacks and that in the end he was never formally charged by the FBI.
Have you ever wondered why many of the patsies, or sorry, deranged mass shooters, are Muslim? That wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the Zionist Government and MSM are trying to paint all Muslims as crazy and scary, would it? Nothing like a good dose of Islamophobia to take your freedom away …
False Flag Formula #5: Patsy Has No Military Training, Yet Shoots Extremely Fast and Accurately
Another element of the false flag formula is the skilled and lethal patsy.
According to the official narrative of false flag ops like Sandy Hook and Aurora, we are supposed to believe that skinny and non-muscular youths, without any discernible military training, were able to acquire expensive military gear (including armor, guns, ammunition and more), wear that gear without getting bogged down in speed, and shoot incredibly fast and accurately.
In San Bernardino, we are supposed to believe that a young mother was strong and skilled enough to participate in killing 14 and injuring 17 people while she was strapped up with body armor and holding heavy weaponry!
In these cases and more, the official story would have you believe that it’s no big deal or just a coincidence that the patsy can acquire all this high-end gear and use it so well.
False Flag Formula #6: Patsy Gets Killed, Drugged or “Suicided”
It is also part of the false flag formula to ensure that the patsy, who is earmarked before the event to take the fall, cannot speak out to rationally defend themselves. This is achieved in a number of ways. The simplest is to have the patsy kill himself or herself by committing “suicide”.
Another favorite way is to take the patsy out in a thrilling high speed chase, which has the added benefit of drawing clueless people in through the MSM and gushingly promoting the police state. Sometimes a patsy is killed in plain sight, just because it’s so important to suppress his testimony (e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald in the JFK assassination).
A third way is to mind control and drug the patsy to such an extent that they become a zombie vegetable unable to articulate anything, as was the case with James Holmes.
False Flag Formula #7: Shooter Leaves Manifesto
In this day and age, writing a manifesto is a strange and anachronistic thing to do. Yet, for some strange reason, shooters’ manifestos seem to crop up an awful lot after mass shootings.
Conveniently for the Controllers, these manifestos provide a perfect explanation for the official narrative, and help fill in the missing (non-existent) motive for the attack – which probably pushes those on the fence over into believing the Government’s version of the event.
While the manifesto is not an element in every false flag operation, it is present in enough of them to be regarded as part of the false flag formula.
False Flag Formula #8: Evidence Gets Conveniently Destroyed
Another element of the false flag formula is the deliberate destruction of evidence, so that the Controllers can cover their tracks.
In 9/11, the scrap metal (in the smoldering ruins of the WTC towers) was immediately shipped off to China right from the start; with Sandy Hook, the entire school was demolished; in San Bernardino, the supposed landlord of the supposed shooters actually allowed MSM reporters into the suspects’ house to poke around and touch all their stuff, in complete disregard for what could be a possible crime scene!
Could it get any more blatant?
False Flag Formula #9: No Obvious Motive for the Mass Attack
Have you ever wondered why there is no obvious motive in any of these mass shootings? Crimes are supposed to be solved on the merit of motive and opportunity, yet to hide the reality of a false flag op, the MSM just lies about the motive part, and chalks it up to a deranged shooter.
Other times we are offered the flimsiest of motives, such as people going on an all-out rampage because they had a grievance with a co-worker. In San Bernardino, we were told the young mother, with a 1-year-old child, was aggressive and psychotic enough to help kill 14 and injure 17 people – at the risk of never seeing her child again!
Meanwhile, the real purveyors of these operations profit immensely from the ensuing fear, yet somehow the majority of people don’t seem to see that motive...
False Flag Formula #10: Immediate Calls for Gun Control
Gun control is obviously one of the key agendas behind all of these false flag mass shootings, since a disarmed population is far easier to exploit and manipulate than an armed one. It is an obvious aspect of the false flag formula. Sometimes gun control is even pushed in the immediate aftermath of the event when people are still in a highly emotional and suggestible state.
Take a look at the behavior of Andy Parker, who we were told was the father of a victim killed in the Virginia mass shooting of 2015.
Within hours of hearing the news of the death of his child, Parker had already contacted and talked with the Governor of Virginia, and then appeared on TV saying he would be devoting his entire life to gun control.
In a similar fashion, Richard Martinez, the alleged father of a Santa Barbara mass hooting victim, appeared on TV right after the death angrily pleading for more gun control. In both cases, the political agenda of gun control angrily dominated their reactions, rather than grief or other emotions.
False Flag Formula #11: Fake “Victims” = Crisis Actors
The above 10 points are a useful outline of the false flag formula as it pertains to mass shootings with real victims, i.e. where real people die. However, ever since the surreal Sandy Hook event, which still contains many unanswered questions, we have entered the twilight zone of the false flag hoax.
This is a term used to describe the false flag mass attacks where no one dies – where fake bodies, fake blood and fake victims are used instead. In this way, the entire operation is more tightly controlled and less messy. A hallmark of the false flag hoax is that the authorities never produce a credible piece of evidence showing an actual dead body of a victim.
Is this the same girl crying at all three massacres - Aurora, Sandy Hook and Boston?
The following 5 points relate to false flag hoaxes, and specifically to the people employed to pull them off – crisis actors. It is truly a testament to just how utterly fake our normal world is (the Matrix) that false flag ops have now descended to the level where we have to question whether the event even happened at all.
There are organizations of crisis actors in the US (such as the IIF), and there is clear evidence crisis actors were used at Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon and many others.
Government officials have been caught using the word “actor” to describe various players in these dramas; the MSM has even resorted to calling them actors too (it was one of the buzzwords of the recent San Bernardino mass shooting).
False Flag Formula #12: “Victims” Get Killed Twice
The surreal quality of the false flag hoax reached point of absurdity when it was discovered that one of the “victims” was reportedly killed twice!
We were told that Noah Pozner was one of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, yet his picture was also among those killed in a Pakistan Taliban attack.
Apparently the recycling of fake victims is another part of the false flag formula.
False Flag Formula #13: Families of “Victims” Have Elite or Acting Backgrounds
Is it just a coincidence that the families of mass shooting “victims” have either elite or acting backgrounds? At the Sandy Hook event, local CEO of the Newtown bank John Trentacosta (whose house was next to the Lanzas and had a lot of unusual activity occurring there the day of Sandy Hook) was connected to the New York Federal Reserve (and thus the international banking elite).
Francine Wheeler was formerly the personal assistant of former chief Democratic National Committee fundraiser Maureen White whose husband Steven Rattner is a Wall Street investment banker and member of the Rockefeller CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)!
It was also noteworthy at Sandy Hook how acting showed up in the resumes of so many of the key players there. Gene Rosen, David and Francine Wheeler (both professional actors) and others all had a background in acting. Father of Virginia mass shooting “victim” Andy Parker is an actor (and a politician too). This fact supports the idea that another element of the false flag formula is to watch for people with elite connections and acting backgrounds.
False Flag Formula #14: Families of “Victims” Show Little to No Emotion, and Even Snigger and Laugh
Luckily for truth seekers, the majority of crisis actors used in these false flag events are poor actors who are utterly unconvincing in the roles they play. The majority display little or no emotion after an alleged tragedy like losing a family member child to a random and violent mass shooting.
It is true that humans do vary widely with emotional response and expression. However, with many of the crisis actors, judging by their reactions, it simply strains credibility too much to believe that they have just have been through a harrowing and traumatic ordeal.
Given the range of possible reactions to a tragedy like losing a loved one in a mass shooting, what are the chances that many of the “victims’” family members are so non-emotional, or so understanding, or so quick to forgive?
It’s shameful enough that the crisis actors playing these roles are perpetrating a monumental deception on the public, tugging at the average person’s heartstrings solely to trick them.
However, on top of that, these actors have the gall to actually laugh – to smile, snigger and giggle – while pulling off their atrocious stunts. The only conclusion to draw from this is that it must be pretty funny to get a paid gig like this fooling millions of people…
False Flag Formula #15: Families of “Victims” Receive Millions in Federal Payoffs
In the US, the land of the lawsuit, people are generally pretty fast to initiate a lawsuit if they feel they have been wronged. It is highly strange, therefore, that none of the alleged parents of the Sandy Hook event decided to sue the Government for negligence or to demand redress for any other grievance.
The Federal Government just gave it over to them without asking! Ask yourself: is is more likely the Government would just do this out of the goodness of its heart, or that the money was more like a bribe/blackmail/payout all rolled into one, awarded to actors playing a part in a role and being sworn to silence?
Conclusion: Use the 15 Elements of the False Flag Formula to Be More Aware
These are 15 elements I noticed forming the false flag formula. There may well be more.
Meanwhile, use the knowledge you have of the false flag formula to become more aware, wise and hip to the deception, so that the next time it unfolds (as it surely will), you will be among those that spot the fakery, rather than among those who are too scared, shell-shocked and gullible to do anything other than buy the official narrative.
Trump Confirms "No Effect On The Outcome Of The Election" Following Intelligence Briefing + Experts Reveal The Tricks Mainstream Media Uses To Brainwash And Control The Masses January 8 2017 | From: Zerohedge / NaturalNews / Various
President-elect Trump has issued a statement following his briefing with various intelligence agencies over the Russian hacking allegations, seemingly rejecting the Democrats' charges that it was the Russians alone and that it had any effect on the outcome of the election.
Additionally, Trump promised to appoint a team to give him a plan to combat cyber attacks within 90 days of taking office.
Experts Reveal The Tricks Mainstream Media Uses To Brainwash And Control The Masses
You may not know this, but intelligence agencies around the world have, for decades, infiltrated “target” countries by having their agents and operatives pose as journalists (no, I’m not an intelligence operative).
That served two purposes: 1) it provided the operative with legitimate cover; and 2) it allowed the operative’s government to use the operatives “media” position to shape public opinion in the host country.
But in truth, that kind of propagandizing and brainwashing is also done by institutional media pushing a specific political agenda. Think back to our recently concluded presidential election cycle and what the “mainstream media” did in a failed effort to get its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton, elected.
They lied, made up narratives out of whole cloth, and tried to smear her opponent, now-President-elect Donald J. Trump, in an effort to defeat him.
As reported by The Waking Times, experts denote a number of techniques that are used by the establishment media to brainwash the public and create/control the daily narrative.
The Mainstream Media Are the Real Purveyors of ‘Fake News’
Edward Bernays is known as the father of modern propaganda. He was the first to use social engineering techniques spread via the mass media of the day. In the early 20th century, he laid the groundwork for what became cultural programming at the societal level by assisting in the transformation of a mostly rural, agrarian-based American society into a homogenized culture of devout statists and consumers.
The principles he developed and implemented have greatly influenced the growth of American culture, how it grew and the direction it took.
Having picked up Bernays’ torch in the 21st century, several experts on modern brainwashing, mind control and propaganda have recently given insight into their craft.
Think about what is ailing our countries today, in terms of societal problems. There is corruption of so-called “grassroots movements” that are actually funded by Left-wing billionaires such as George Soros and Bill Gates, and yet the movements are portrayed by the establishment media very often as spontaneous and locally brewed, but all are attempting to achieve a specific social and political result.
The efforts of these allegedly organic groups are amplified many times their size by the media, which gives them both credence and a megaphone with which to shout their views. And what do they shout?
America is racist, bigoted, homophobic, unfair, politically broken, etc. Never are the calls for unity or praise for our country given any attention at all.
Much of this is done via a technique known as “astroturfing.” Seasoned veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains;
“Astroturf is a perversion of grassroots. Astroturf is when political, corporate or other special interests disguise themselves and publish blogs, start Facebook and twitter accounts, publish ads, letters to the editor, or simply post comments online, to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking.”
Controlling Our Thoughts by Creating False Narratives
Another technique used is subliminal messaging. This is a cornerstone of mind control, and when a person is unwittingly bombarded with cleverly concealed information, an emotion can be trigged leaving a person’s intellect and better judgment subjugated in favor of a mental process like fear or sexual desire.
You may never consciously understand or realize why you begin to adopt certain behaviors, products of lifestyles, but the attraction is nonetheless real and that manifests itself through actual personal choices.
In a 2011 documentary called Programming the Nation, filmmaker, graphic artist and digital media producer Jeff Warrick, a former advertising sales rep, provided examples of how subliminal messaging and other subconscious methods are employed by ad executives and other media to create cultural ‘norms’ and social programs like consumerism, materialization of women’s bodies, health choices and the glorification of violence.
“Could such techniques really be contributing to a variety of social, political and economic problems currently present in our culture? Such as obesity, anorexia, and other eating disorders? The ongoing war on terror?
And what about the ever-increasing amounts of debt, that has tightened its grip on a growing percentage of the population?” the documentary says.
Other techniques include fake news - yes, by the mainstream media - omission (not covering an issue as though it wasn’t real or important); slanting coverage through the use of biased “expert” sources; and publishing falsified data and science as though it were legitimate.
The European Union Initiates Cashless Society Project January 8 2017 | From: GlobalResearch
A few months back The Guardian ran an article stating that “Swedes are blazing a trail in Europe, with banks, buses, street vendors and even churches expecting plastic or virtual payment” as if the cashless society was something to be celebrated by modern society.
“I don’t use cash any more, for anything,” said Louise Henriksson, 26, a teaching assistant. “You just don’t need it. Shops don’t want it; lots of banks don’t even have it. Even for a candy bar or a paper, you use a card or phone.”
Cash transactions are already outdated in Sweden. According to central bank the ‘Riksbank’, cash transactions will make up up barely 0.5% of the value of all payments made in Sweden by 2020.
Likewise and according to The Independent, Denmark has moved one step closer to becoming the world’s first cashless society, as the government proposes scrapping the obligation for retailers to accept cash as payment – because, as they say, its to do with the “burden of managing change and notes.”
Strange then that all this is happening in an environment where EUR bank note circulation is still rising.
The European Payments Council (EPC), a subdivision of the European Central Bank, are taking steps in their quest to fully eliminate all cash. The reason is not to lift the burden off retailers or to make transactions more convenient but in reality to raise desperately needed taxes.
Highly respected ‘ArmstrongEconomics‘ reports that the EPC are going full steam ahead to enable immediate payment systems throughout not just the Eurozone but the entire European Union.
The Single European Payments Area (SEPA) has been devised with the ultimate goal of eliminating ATM cash machines and force everyone to use their mobile phones or plastic cards, the project starting as early as November 2017.
In the absence of confirmed information on this point, it is likely that tourists and business people will be forced to pre-pay Euro’s onto an App if they come from a country outside the eurozone, currently made up of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.
“The Single Euro Payments Area (or “SEPA” for short) is where more than 500 million citizens, over 20 million businesses and European public authorities can make and receive payments in euro.
SEPA also means better banking services for all: transparent pricing, valuable guarantees ensuring that your payments are received promptly and in full, and banks assuming responsibility if something goes wrong with your payment.”
This year, meetings and conferences called “Towards a cashless society” were started to get the information transfer across to the infrastructure, supported very heavily by the banks.
It looks as though the initial battleground for banning cash will be… Greece.
“Greek banks propose a series of measures to combat tax evasion, strengthen the electronic transactions and limit the use of cash in the economy. One of the measures proposed is a special tax on cash withdrawals.
Bankers reportedly stress that cash money can easily and largely be channeled in the black economy. Therefore, a tax on cash withdrawals will drastically reduce cash transactions and by extension the black economy.”
The proposal includes reforming the tax system by introducing a revenue-expenditure system. Households and/or workers will only be taxed on the amount of income that is has not been spent. In this way, people will have a strong incentive to seek receipts for any expenditure in order to increase their expenditure and reduce the tax amount they will have to pay.
There will also be an obligation for all businesses and regardless of their size to pay electronically every salary and wage.
There is another tactic in play to push the cashless society even quicker. As Sratfor Global Intelligence reports:
“The eurozone has found a new scapegoat for international crime: the 500-euro note.
The Continent’s leaders are seriously discussing decommissioning the euro’s highest denomination, which is favored by crime groups for transferring massive sums across international borders.
Eliminating the bank note could help temper criminal activity, but in reality the implications are much broader. The idea is just the most recent step in an ongoing process moving Europe, and indeed the world, closer to an entirely cashless economy.”
None of this will go down well in both Germany and Austria who experienced periods of extreme hyperinflation after the world wars. This, along with life under dictatorships and in high-surveillance societies, has given both populations a fierce desire to protect their privacy (please note) - something that is afforded by the anonymity of using cash - and to keep wealth in physical form to avoid relying on systemic institutions.
There is another more sinister reason for forcing a cashless society. TruePublica reported last September that a deal had been signed by the administrations of the US, UK and EU when it comes to bank depositors. We said that:
“Procedures in the event of the failure of a systemically important bank clearly states that depositors are to be protected – that is, until options have ceased to exist.
Next time, the state will be last in line, not first. Depositor bail-in schemes are now a reality.”
In other words, if a big bank fails you will be unable to cause a run on a bank by withdrawing your cash.
Indeed, the rescue of Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, reported by all the press as imminent has one other thing in common, none of them are sure if this will be full or partial nationalisation, state bail-out or a depositor bail-in.
What the authorities want to do is avoid this nightmare scenario that happened on Britain’s streets: The Economist (Sept 2007 just before the full blown financial crisis erupted) - The queues that formed outside Northern Rock, the country’s fifth-biggest mortgage lender, represented the first bank run in Britain since 1866.
The panic was prompted by the very announcement designed to prevent it. Only when the Bank of England said that it would stand by the stricken Northern Rock did depositors start to run for the exit.
Attempts by Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, to reassure savers served only to lengthen the queues of people outside branches demanding their money.
Bitcoin Surge Explained and The Future Of Cryptocurrencies
The run did not stop until Mr Darling gave a taxpayer-backed guarantee on September 17th that, for the time being, all the existing deposits at Northern Rock were safe.
In addition to all of this, the use of negative interest rates, never implemented in 5,000 years since the invention of money, is designed to force money out of the banks and into the economy which can be manipulated simply by changing the rate when required.
The holy grail of economic measurement is rising GDP, which has eluded the ECB policymakers since the financial crash reared its ugly head leaving wave after wave of social crisis.
Its answer was to print money and push 50% more into the economy and yet achieved an inflation rate barely above zero. Taxing cash at ATM’s or forcing it out of banks via punitive interest will be the norm in a few years.
Finally, with all money moving electronically the banks and government have another distinct advantage over you.
Eighteen months ago, there was a run on the banks in Greece so the central bank imposed capital controls, highly restricting the amount of cash that could be withdrawn daily. In the few weeks prior to those controls ¢45billion was withdrawn and stuffed under mattresses. This won’t happen again if there are no ATM’s and cash transfers have all but been eliminated.
One way to the other – in the end, you are not going to be in control of your own money in a cashless society, that’s for sure.
Diary Of A Person Of Interest & Oxford PHD Katherine Horton "Intelligence Agencies Are Attacking Me With Direct Energy Weapons!" January 3 2017 | From: Endarken / Stop007.org
Kiwi journalist and activist Suzie Dawson has been extensively targeted by Western intelligence agencies and their contractors. This video and the following one are very important. The second one more so if you want to understand the how and why of exotic microwave 'Non-Lethal Weapons'.
In the wake of several attempts on her life, she had to leave New Zealand to live in exile in Europe.
In this unique documentary, Suzie discusses what it is really like to be a target of the Five Eyes; why she was targeted, who she was targeted by, how they targeted her, what their end game is and how to try to counter it.
Suzie's original article titled 'Diary of a Person of Interest' can be found here.
Her debrief and speech notes from her 2015 talk of the same name can be read here.
The extent of the havoc wreaked by American political interests in New Zealand (particularly since 2008) is best explained by Suzie's colossal article "The Desecration of New Zealand" which can be read here:
"Hey guys, thank you for watching and sharing my first film. The events depicted in it roughly cover the period October 2011 to January 2015. Some may find the topics discussed here terrifying - but it is reality in this day and age and to change it we have to face it.
There is a lot more yet to be revealed about my story, what I did and what has happened to me since becoming exiled. So you can expect more content from me and soon. If you want to reach out, or to walk with me on my journey you can follow me on Twitter: @Suzi3D or keep an eye on my website: Suzi3D.com.
The more friendly eyes I have on me, the safer I am and the better chance I have to be able to continue my work. Please, pass this video on to anyone who you think may be a target, as the information presented here can be the difference between sanity and a breakdown, to someone going through it. Thank you so much for your support. Love, Suzie"
14 Eyebrow-Raising Things Google Knows About You December 24 2016 | From: NetworkWorld
Some are fascinating, others are frightening - but here's how to find out what Google has on you. Google may know more about me than I know about myself.
I'm not just saying that, either: I recently started poking around in Google's personal data repositories and realized that, between my wide-reaching use of the company's services and my own brain's inability to remember anything for more than seven seconds, Google may actually have the upper hand when it comes to knowledge about my life.
From face-tagged photos of my past adventures (what year did I go to Nashville, again - and who went with me to that Eddie Vedder show?) to the minute-by-minute play-by-play of my not-so-adventuresome days (wait, you mean I really only left the house once last Wednesday - and just to get a freakin' sandwich?!), Google's got all sorts of goods on me.
Heck, even my hopes and dreams (which may or may not involve sandwiches) are probably catalogued somewhere in its systems. And the data itself is only half the story: Google also compiles oodles of stats - stats that, for better and for worse, shed light onto the tech-connected habits of our modern lives. And don't doubt Apple does the exact same things either.
How many emails have you actually sent over the years, for instance, and how many thousands of web pages have you pulled up in your browser? It really is enlightening, among other things, to see your actions broken down so precisely.
Before you freak out, though, remember: The only way anyone else could get at any of this info would be if they were to gain access to your Google account - something two-factor authentication and good mobile security hygiene make highly unlikely.
And remember, too, that all this data collection is completely optional - and very much a tradeoff: By agreeing to let Google store and use your data, you're getting access to an ever-expanding array of futuristic features at no monetary cost.
But the decision is ultimately in your hands. To learn more about how Google uses specific types of data and how you can opt out of any or all areas of collection, see the "Opting out and taking control" section at the end of this story.
All of that being said, here are some of the more amusing - and maybe slightly surprising - things you might find about yourself by prodding the right parts of Google's noggin. How many of these items actually apply to you depends on which Google services you use and how exactly you use them.
To wit: Android users who take advantage of built-in features such as voice commands, location history and photo backups will almost certainly have more data tracked by Google than non-Android users.
But anyone who regularly uses Gmail, Google search, Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome and/or other Google services from any mobile device or computer will likely find at least some interesting nuggets from the following list.
1. A full history of your voice commands with any Google product - including actual audio recordings
Everything you've ever said to Google, in one convenient place. OK, Google: Remind me how silly I sound when talking to my phone (you know, when it seems like no one else is listening). If you use voice commands on Android or any other Google product (for instance, voice searches in the Google iOS app when you're logged in with your Google account), head to the "Voice & Audio" section of Google's My Activity site to see and hear a comprehensive list of everything you've ever said to that inanimate object in your pocket.
And yes, your voice really does sound like that.
2. An objective breakdown of your real BFFs (according to Google)
Data doesn't lie. Discover whom among your Google contacts you interact with the most by clicking the "Contacts" header on Google's account dashboard. Just be prepared to make up excuses if your significant other doesn't make the "Frequently contacted" list.
3. How much stuff Chrome has saved about you
Your browsing habits, broken down into indisputable numbers.
If you use the Chrome browser and typically stay signed into it, check out your account's Chrome Sync settings page to see all sorts of brag- and/or shame-worthy stats about your personal browsing habits - things like how many bookmarks you've saved, how many tabs you have open across different devices and how many websites you've typed into Chrome's address bar (since last resetting your browser's history).
Free cookie* if you guess within five points of any of your values. * A free browser cookie, that is. C'mon - what did you expect?
4. How many Gmail conversations you've had
Provided you use Gmail's archiving system instead of permanently deleting messages, you may be in for a shock: Click the aptly named "Gmail" header in Google's account dashboard, and get ready to see why your days always seem so short.
Case in point: I have 145,810 message threads in my Gmail account -- with just over 28,000 sent messages. Let me repeat that: Twenty-eight thousand sent messages. No wonder I never get anything accomplished.
File this one under "Cool Yet Creepy": Google Maps' Timeline feature contains a detailed diary of your every move -- down to the minute.
No exaggeration: If you carry an Android phone and have opted into location history, the site will show you where you were every moment of every day. And if you really want to weird yourself out, open Timeline from a desktop and click the year tab in the upper-left corner of the screen. Select "All Time," then click the red box in the lower-left corner to see an ordered list of your most visited places.
(My top four are currently my house, Target, the grocery and Barnes & Noble. What can I say? It's a wild and crazy life I lead.)
6. A full list of everything you've done from any Android device
Your smartphone is a fantastic tool for productivity-enhancing tasks like word processing, spreadsheet creation, and... oh, who the hell are we kidding? You're using the thing for mindless web browsing and meaningless game-playing, just like everyone else.You can see a detailed log of activity on your Android devices at Google's My Activity site.
Find out for sure what you're doing on your Android devices - or what someone else is doing on them, if colleagues or kiddos ever get their hands on your phone - by opening Google's My Activity site. Select the option to "Filter by date & product," then select "Android" and click the blue search icon.
Just don't let your boss see that you spent all of Tuesday's meeting "working" on Words With Friends.
7. A comprehensive collection of every site you've visited in Chrome - on any device
These days, Chrome isn't just a desktop browser - and if you're using the program from a phone or tablet as well as a regular computer, you're bound to have quite the collective history.
See where you've been on the web (while signed in to Chrome) by opening Google's My Activity page and checking "Chrome" in the filter list. You can search for specific keywords and even filter further by date -- a useful tool if you ever need to find a site you pulled up somewhere but can't quite remember.
If you're not seeing your Chrome history on the My Activity page, go to the Activity controls and make sure the Web & App Activity toggle is on and the "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services" box is checked. (Also make sure that you're signed into Chrome on your various devices.) Your Chrome activity will be tracked from this point forward.
As for the sites you'd rather not have recorded - well, amigos, let's just say that Incognito mode is your friend.
8. Exactly how many Google searches you've made this month
First and foremost, Google is a search engine -- so how much are you Googling? Get the skinny by scrolling down to the "Search History" header in Google's account dashboard.
Click the header to see precisely how many times you've called upon Google's knowledge from any device while signed into your Google account in the past month -- along with a breakdown of your most common search types and some of your most frequently used queries. (Again: Incognito mode. Never forget.)
9. A running count of how many Android devices you've had connected to your account over the years
Think you've been through a lot of phones and mobile devices? Calculate your official Android Geek Quotient score by pulling up Google's account dashboard and looking for the "Android" header. The big green number beneath it will tell you how many Android products have ever been associated with your account. (Hopefully yours isn't as high as my almost-silly-seeming score of 78.)
You can get more detailed info on all the devices, too -- including when each product was last used and a list of all the apps it has backed up to Google's servers -- by clicking the header. And a quick tip: If you want to get old, inactive devices out of your hair, head to the Play Store settings page and uncheck the "Show in menus" option next to any phones or tablets that are no longer relevant.
10. A running count of how many Android apps you've ever installed
Your Android app stats can be both enlightening and alarming. Trying out new apps is a great way to keep your mobile tech feeling fresh -- to a certain point, anyway. See if you've crossed the line from adventurous to ridiculous by finding the "Play Store" header on Google's account dashboard.
If you manage to top my current total of 1,191 apps, seek immediate help.
11. Some stats on your invite-accepting habits
Are you a person who tends to accept event invitations? Or do you say "no" more often than "yes"? If you're a Google Calendar user who frequently interacts with other Google Calendar users, you can find out by clicking the "Calendar" header at Google's account dashboard. That'll give you a breakdown of your accepting-vs.-rejecting activity over the past month, including a handy pie chart to illustrate your temperament in visual form. Hey, at least there's no line graph on the lameness of your excuses.
12. How many images you've stored with Google Photos
I don't know about you, but I tend to take way too many pictures -- mostly of my 22-month-old daughter (and occasionally of those damn squirrels that always run through my backyard and taunt me with their superior short-term memories).
Thankfully, Google Photos makes it simple for me to store all these images and access them anywhere -- and also to see at a glance just how absurdly large my personal photo collection has gotten. To get the lowdown on your own virtual photo box, mosey down to the "Photos" header in Google's account dashboard. And be sure to take a mental snapshot of the result.
13. A full list of all your activity in the Google Play Store
Everything you've ever searched for in the Play Store, in one centralized place.
Have you ever looked at or searched for something in the Play Store -- then tried to find it again later, only to realize your memory was worse than your friendly neighborhood squirrel's? I know I have.
So use my trick: The next time you find yourself wishing for a time machine, just scamper over to Google's My Activity page. Filter the results to "Play," and voila: You'll find a full list of every item you've viewed and every Play Store search you've made while signed into your Google account. Now if only this thing had a way to tell me where I buried my acorn the other day...
14. How many YouTube videos you've watched this month
We've all been there: You're in the middle of something extremely productive (naturally) when a single YouTube link happens to catch your eye. Watching one video seems harmless enough, right?
But then the inevitable happens: One video turns to two. Wait, what's that in the "Related" section - a clip of a bird whistling the melody to Guns N' Roses' "Patience"? Click. Watch. Repeat. Before you know it, you're 19 videos in, and the afternoon is over.
Discover just how much YouTube time-whittlin' you've done in the last month (while logged into your Google account) by visiting Google's account dashboard and clicking the "YouTube" header. And for the love of Goog, if your monthly tally is over 200, think long and hard before clicking that next cat-dancing clip.
Opting out and taking control
Want to turn off specific types of data collection or delete existing info from your Google account history? The Google privacy site is the best place to start; there, Google provides detailed information about how each type of data is used along with links to opt out of any specific areas. You can also visit Google's Activity controls page for a simple single-page list of on-off toggles.
If you're looking to clean up your history for anything that Google has been tracking, head to the My Activity site.
You can delete any individual item right then and there by clicking the three-dot icon in its upper-right corner and choosing Delete, or click the "Delete activity by" link in the left column for an easy way to erase info based on date and/or product.
Data collection controls can be also found on an Android device by opening the main system settings and selecting Google (or, if you're on an older device, looking for the standalone Google Settings app) and then tapping "Personal info & privacy."
Top 10 Most Delusional “Facts” Of The Lunatic Left-Wing Fact-Checkers December 22 2016 | From: NaturalNews
Since Facebook has announced its intention to erect a Ministry of Truth echo chamber by labeling all news it doesn’t like “fake news,” I thought it appropriate to unveil the top 10 most delusional “facts” people will be subjected to if they keep viewing Facebook, CNN, or any other news propaganda being put out by what has become the mentally ill political left today.
As anyone with a functioning brain already knows, the unhinged left is utterly clueless about the properties of “facts” or where they come from. To them, “facts” are whatever their friends keep repeating, even if they have no basis whatsoever in evidence or reality.
In essence, “facts” are whatever they believe, while “fake news” is whatever you believe. (It really is that simple in their feeble brains.)
So consider these top 10 most delusional “facts” we’ll soon see rolled out as “truth” by the newly-sprung news cartels operating inside Fakebook.
“Fact” #1: Eating Meat is Cruelty to Animals, But Harvesting the Organs of Living, Partially-Born Human Babies Isn’t Cruel at All
Somehow, the delusional left has decided that animals are conscious beings but not human babies. Yeah, it’s insane, I know. Liberalism is best defined as a kind of mental illness where a person can hold two utterly contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time while simultaneously believing them both.
To demonstrate this particular brand of lunacy, a Beastie Boy recently announced a new line of “cruelty free” sneakers with proceeds to benefit abortion providers. Yep, “no animals were harmed in the process of butchering these babies” might as well be the sicko slogan of the unhinged left.
“Fact” #2: If Not For the Burning of Fossil Fuels, Earth’s Climate Would Never Change at All
At first, they called their hoax “global warming,” but when it turned out the Earth wasn’t warming at all - funny how that works when you use actual data instead of fraudulently altered numbers - they had to roll out a more encompassing name: Climate Change.
According to Climate Change cultists - named thusly because no amount of evidence can alter their “faith” in Climate Change - Earth’s climate never changed at all until humankind came along and started burning fossil fuels.
But now - OMG! - every hurricane, flood, drought, forest fire and freezing arctic blast is automatically attributed to “climate change.” Yep, especially among young leftists who have been indoctrinated by the lies of government-run schools, they think their ancestors lived in a time when Earth was eternal Spring, with no climate variation or natural disasters whatsoever.
It’s only because you and I are using air conditioning and driving SUVs that the planet has become angry, unleashing all sorts of climatic “changes” that otherwise would have never occurred.
This explanation, you may have noticed, closely resembles the superstitions of 5th-century humans who largely believed that bad weather and solar eclipses were caused by “angry gods” seeking to punish them. In over 1000 years, we’ve learned nothing, it seems, and “progressives” have thrust us back to an era of incredible ignorance and superstition where scientific evidence is abandoned for the sake of powerful cult-like beliefs.
“Fact” #3: People with XY Chromosomes Can Instantly Transform All Their Genes Into XX Chromosomes by Declaring Themselves to be Women (the Theory of Spontaneous Genetic Transmutation…)
Ask any young liberal and they’ll tell you there are at least 30 genders, maybe even more if you count “TransUnicorn.” If you can stop laughing hilariously, ask them whether sex is determined by genetic expression or by a “choice.” They will insist it’s a “choice!”
And just like that, the delusional leftists discard centuries of scientific knowledge in genetics, sexual reproduction, phenotype expressions and physical reality. If you dare point out to them that “transgenderism is a mental illness,” they will label you a purveyor of either hatred or “fake news.”
To them, a “feeling” is more REAL than actual science, you see. And if a young man sucks down enough bisphenol-A to start “feeling” like a woman, then his womanhood is accepted as a “fact” by the deranged lunatic left. Some of them even insist that such “gender-fluid” biological males can get pregnant and have babies!
I have named this hilarious bit of leftish delusional idiocy the Theory of Spontaneous Genetic Transmutation. This theory is quite literally accepted as “fact” by nearly every liberal under the age of 30.
“Fact” #4: Media News Coverage During the Presidential Campaign Was Completely Fair to Both Clinton and Trump, But the DNC Hacks Were One-Sided, and Thus Totally Unfair
Yep, according to the delusional left, the almost universally glowing media coverage of Hillary Clinton - alongside relentless media attacks waged against Trump - were “fair and balanced.” But Trump won the election because the DNC hacks (which were actually leaks from a Bernie Sanders supporter, not hacks at all) were totally unfair because they only leaked the emails of the democrats, not republicans.
Kellyanne Conway: CIA Should Go and Testify and Stop Leaking to the Media
Hidden in that protest is an astonishing presumption that all the leaked DNC emails were true! And they reveal a deeply shocking level of collusion inside the DNC to destroy Bernie Sanders and steal the nomination for Hillary Clinton.
“Fact” #5: Hillary Clinton Should be President Because She Won the Popular Vote, But When Bernie Sanders Kept Winning the Popular Vote During the Primary, Clinton Somehow Got All the Delegates… Hmmm…
Hilariously, the Clinton campaign (and all delusional leftists in general) only believes in “popular votes” when they win the popular vote.
When they don’t win the popular vote, they believe in rigging the delegates to make sure their candidate gets the delegate votes even if they lost the popular vote. This is exactly how Hillary Clinton kept walking away with the vast majority of delegates even in states where Bernie Sanders won the popular votes (sometimes in a landslide).
Beyond all that, the presidential election is not determined by popular votes, or else Donald Trump would have campaigned heavily in places like New York City and Los Angeles.
The winner is determined by Electoral Votes, which is why Donald Trump campaigned in the areas that deliver electoral victories. (Gosh, is he supposed to be a bad person for following the rules and winning by those rules?)
Judge Jeanine: I'll tell you what hope is, Michelle
If the Clinton campaign didn’t think the Electoral College was fair, why didn’t they protest it before the results revealed Hillary to be the loser? The answer, of course, is because nearly every leftist in America was completely convinced that Hillary Clinton would win the election (because that’s what the media echo chamber told them).
Hilariously, this caused many of them to avoid going out to vote, thereby ensuring their ballot box loss. CNN’s false media narrative that Hillary was “unbeatable,” in other words, may have actually handed Donald Trump the election victory. (Such is the price of extreme arrogance.)
“Fact” #6: There’s No Such Thing as a Hate Crime Against White People
According to the lunatic left, “hate crimes” can only be committed by white people against people of color. The opposite cannot occur because white people “deserve” to be beaten, raped, or shot by people of color, you see. (For the record, I am a person of color, which means I am therefore incapable of committing any hate crime myself, you see.)
Thus, when a group of Black Lives Matter terrorists marches in the streets calling for the open murder of white people - or dragging people out of their vehicles and beating them solely because of their white skin color - they are not engage in hate crimes at all, according to the delusional left.
Instead, they are said to be engaged in “social justice.” Because, you see, violence is always called “justice” by the worst criminals in every collapsing society.
This is why the entire left-wing media censors all news about black people attacking white people, but strongly emphasizes all news about white people attacking black people. It’s all part of controlling the narrative to paint the kind of one-sided propaganda that the delusional left depends on for its very survival.
For the record, here at Natural News, we believe that there is no such thing as a thought crime. Crimes of violence are crimes in and of themselves due to their actions. Attaching a layer of “hate” to the motivation behind such a crime is a grave injustice.
Crimes should be prosecuted based on the actions of those who committed them, not on the words uttered while carrying them out. Otherwise, we are admitting that words are crimes.
“Fact” #7: Guns Are Conscious, Self-Animating Objects That Leap Out Of Their Holsters and Shoot People All On Their Own
According to delusional leftists who essentially believe in magic, guns are self-directed objects that shoot people all on their own. Leftists truly believe that a gun in a room can leap to its feet, target individuals and discharge bullets without needing to be actuated by the will of a person.
This is where the delusional left comes up with meaningless phrases like “gun violence,” placing the emphasis on the inanimate object rather than the person deploying it. There is no such thing as “gun violence” any more than there is “hammer violence” when murderers use hammers.
When Somali tribes commit mass murder against each other using machetes, the left never describes such events as “machete violence” and tries to blame machetes. Ever wonder why? Because that would sound incredibly stupid.
But when it comes to guns, the left gladly invokes the phrase “gun violence” in order to blame guns rather than people. It’s a deliberately loaded phrase that’s designed to blame guns rather than the mostly left-wing criminals who use them to commit violence against society.
Similarly, when radical Islamic terrorists used an ice cream truck to mow down tourists in Paris, the left-wing media reported the mass murder as being carried out by the truck! News reports proclaimed, “TRUCK runs over 85 people…” or “Authorities are searching for TRUCK that murdered 85…”
Somehow, it never occurs to idiotic leftists that a terrorist was driving the truck. And if trucks are such murderous instruments of death, then why isn’t the left calling for a nationwide truck ban?
“Fact” #8: Only Progressives Can Identify “Facts”… Everyone Else Doesn’t Know What They’re Talking About
This “fact” is the best one of all. According to the delusional, fringe left, only people who support left-wing policies can recognize or identify “facts.”
This twisted special sauce of circular logic is what leftists tell themselves when they proclaim their version of “facts” to be absolute and authoritative, while anyone else’s version of “facts” are nothing but lies and falsehoods.
Thus, the lunatic left believes it gets facts straight from God in a sort of “divining ritual” from which indisputable facts emerge much like a genie might appear after vigorously rubbing a brass lamp.
This “monopoly of facts” is the sole domain of liberals, you see, and they know this because so many of them agree with that supposition, thus proving it to be true by “social consensus.” They surveyed each other, you see, and now they cite the survey which states that “100% of all people everywhere participate in surveys.” This, too, is a “fact” of the delusional left-wing media.
(It’s kind of convenient for journalists at the Washington Post when they merely need to cite each other as “unnamed sources” for whatever news they happen to be fabricating at the moment, too.
Who needs actual intelligence sources when WashPost reporters can circle jerk each other for made-up quotes that get worked into their front page fabrications?)
“Fact” #9: Intentions Count MoreThan Actions
Obama is a good President and a good person. How do we know that? Because he has good intentions.
Never mind the fact that he doubled the national debt to nearly $20 trillion. Never mind the fact that his DOJ masterminded a gun-running operation to put illegal weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels (Operation Fast and Furious).
Never mind the indisputable observation that he was a race baiter who created division, hatred and distrust across America’s cultural fabric. And pay no attention to the astonishing job loss, unemployment and plummeting wages caused by the Obamacare scheme he championed as some sort of twisted, pathetic “legacy.”
Nope, you’re not supposed to consider actual reality when it comes to judging people on the left. They are all given a pass on their behavior as long as they have good intentions, you see.
This is why it doesn’t matter to the left that Bill Clinton is an accused rapist, sexual molester and repeated attacker of multiple women who have openly and publicly accused him of sexual assault.
According to the delusional left, Bill Clinton gets a free pass on all that because he’s a good liberal. He has compassion, don’t you know? He supports abortion, carbon taxes and banning the Second Amendment. Thus, according to the left, it doesn’t matter how many women he raped, abused or molested.
Facts be damned. When it comes to protecting the champions of the political left, no amount of legitimate evidence of criminal wrongdoing can overcome the left’s blind faith in their so-called leaders, even if they be pedophiles ordering sicko sessions with minors like buying pizza off a menu.
“Fact” #10: Bigger Government is Always the Answer
No matter what challenges society may face, the disconnected left believes bigger government is always the answer.
Got a problem with people drinking too much soda? We need bigger government to function as “food police” and criminalize large sodas offerings.
Are too many dementia patients forgetting where they are and wandering aimlessly across mall parking lots? We need bigger government, the left insists, to microchip and track the location of all those afflicted with “mental disorders.” (It’s true, Congress just passed the law for government to microchip citizens.)
Can’t afford your rent? Mobile phone bills? Groceries? Don’t worry, the government will create a new program to take money from all those who earned it and redistribute the funds to loyal democrat voters who consume it (while, of course, padding the pockets of the politically connected elite along the way).
According to the delusional left, there’s no problem too large that even larger government can’t solve! Their utopian economy, in fact, is a system where the free market is abolished and replaced by a centrally planned economy which values “equality” above all else.
Our world already has a system like that, by the way. It’s called “Venezuela.” And right now, all the self-righteous Venezuelans who voted for “equality” are eating out of grocery store dumpsters while having their cash criminalized and confiscated by the very same government they stupidly put into power. (Will socialists never learn?)
The Greatest “Fact” of All is the Fact That Leftists Have Increasingly Become Fact-Free Lunatics
So let’s cut the crap. Almost everything the lunatic left insists is a “fact” turns out to be a fairy tale or outright lie. Polar bears are going extinct! If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor! Raising taxes on corporations is good for creating jobs!
Hillary Clinton believes in honoring the outcome of all democratic elections… except for the ones she loses.
And if you lose an election in a democracy, the correct course of action, according to the left, is to keep threatening electoral voters with murder until you get your way.
It turns out that, for the most part, leftists are fact-free lunatics. I could lay out a hundred striking examples of the lunacy and contradictions of the delusional left, but you probably already see many of them yourself.
The left has become so deranged and disconnected from reality that their cheap tactics of race baiting and slandering their political opponents simply don’t work anymore.
The political left in America, which was once a semi-respected organization that opposed George Bush’s corporate-run wars and fought to reduce air pollution has become a twisted cabal of deranged fringe lunatics who have already crossed the threshold of mental illness.
Now, with the help of Fakebook - which has become the online equivalent of Darth Vader - they’re going to try to steamroll society with a whole new set of fabricated “facts” that will also fail miserably… just like their recent election efforts.
Facts are stubborn things. More importantly, no one has a monopoly on them.
Those who try to censor whatever “facts” they don’t agree with will only end up making the things they dispute increasingly popular for the simple reason that human beings are curious about the world around them, and they don’t take kindly to having a homogenized, sanitized worldview shoved down their throats by self-proclaimed “fact checkers” who genuinely belong in a psychiatric ward.
But don’t take my word for anything. After all, everything I’ve written here is merely my opinion. Open your eyes, explore the world for yourself, and make up your own mind.
That simple act, by the way, will make you a lifelong enemy of the left… which demands you remain blindly obedient to their “facts” even when your own direct experiences contradict them.
Remember: The ultimate goal of the radical left is to make you abandon trust in your own senses, thoughts and logical conclusions. Only then can they dominate your existence with their fabrications that any clear-headed person would instantly see right through.
Facebook To Become Left-Wing Propaganda Echo Chamber With Orwellian Plan To Label Independent Journalism “Fake” + Facebook Jumps On ‘Fake News’ Fact-Checker Train, Will ‘Roll Out’ With PolitiFact December 21 2016 | From: NaturalNews / WashingtonTimes
Facebook has announced a new plan today that will very quickly transform the social media site into an “echo chamber” of left-wing media lies and delusional propaganda (just like we’ve recently seen pushed by the Washington Post).
The new effort will rely on left-wing “fact checker” organizations like Politifact and Snopes to determine the “truthiness” of news stories, reports Business Insider. Those stories deemed by left-wing “fact checkers” to be inaccurate will be buried in Facebook users’ feeds as a form of organized totalitarian censorship.
This Ministry of Truth “news dictatorship” plan will, of course, transform Facebook into nothing more than a news “bubble” where left-wing propaganda is repeated as “fact” while independent journalism is labeled “fake.”
This means all stories that are critical of vaccines, GMOs, Planned Parenthood or Hillary Clinton will be censored out of existence. The political left, you see, doesn’t seek to win any debate at all… their goal is to ban the debate so that you never read any views other than theirs. (They can’t win any legitimate debates or legitimate elections, so they cheat.)
In essence, Facebook has now announced it’s going to become the North Korea of social media.
Facebook’s “Fact Checkers” Are Left-Wing Propagandsts Who Despise Factual Journalism
“We believe providing more context can help people decide for themselves what to trust and what to share,” the company said.
“We’ve started a program to work with third-party fact checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations.”
“Facebook has announced it will introduce warning labels on stories they deem to be “fake news,” with the help of partisan “fact checking” organisations such as Snopes and PolitiFact,”reports Breitbart.com.
Business Insider reports that these organisations will include the likes of Snopes, ABC, Politifact, and FactCheck.org, all of which have records of left-wing partisanship - particularly throughout the 2016 election.
For example, PolitiFact infamously said it was “mostly false” when Donald Trump claimed in a presidential debate that Hillary Clinton wanted “open borders.” PolitiFact made this ruling despite Clinton being on the record at a paid speech saying “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”
Trump also said that Russia has 1,800 nuclear warheads and has expanded its arsenal while the U.S. has not. PolitiFact admitted that Trump’s claim was factual, but it rated the statement as “half true” for supposedly “missing the big picture.”
In both of these cases, PolitiFact went beyond mere fact-checking and moved the goal posts in ways that benefited Clinton’s candidacy.
This type of ideological “fact checking” went beyond parody during October’s presidential debates, with NBC taking Trump’s statement that Clinton “acid washed” her emails (a reference to the data deletion tool “BleachBit”) 100% literally and declaring the statement “false.”
It’s Time to Leave Facebook and Discover Alternatives Like Diaspora or Gab.ai
As Facebook turns into an echo chamber of mentally ill liberal whackos, informed people will look elsewhere for uncensored, independent news. One of the best alternatives for Facebook is Diaspora, a network of independent social media hubs run by independent, open source organizations like Natural News.
Our Diaspora hub is found at Share.NaturalNews.com, and it’s rapidly growing. There, you’ll receive every story we post, unlike Facebook where 99% of our posts are deliberately buried by Facebook itself.
Gab.ai is also rapidly growing, promising uncensored free speech in a social media format. You can find my articles posted in real time at these two accounts:
Join all these sources so that you can stay informed. Understand that Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and all the other internet gatekeepers are now engaged in an all out war against independent news, hoping to censor it out of existence.
(They’ve lost the narrative, and they lost the election. Now they’re desperate to destroy whatever voices they don’t control… but it will only cause them to lose their audience.)
A Mass Exodus Away From Fakebook
By censoring independent journalism, Facebook is going to lose tens of millions of users who will simply go somewhere else. The left-wing propaganda swallowers who stay behind at Facebook will simply become increasingly misinformed and mentally ill as they follow the left-wing media down the rabbit hole of delusional Russian hacker conspiracy theories and hatred against America, the Constitution and the entire male population in general.
It won’t be long, probably, before Snopes “officially” confirms that having white skin makes you a racist, or that all men are evil due to their genetics.
Politifact might throw down its own delusional “facts” that claim Donald Trump was hypnotized by the Russians as a Manchurian candidate to commit genocide against women (or whatever) whose body parts will be harvested for organ donations to gray aliens from planet Cockamamie.
I can’t wait for Snopes to confirm that people can transform XY chromosomes into XX chromosomes by declaring themselves to be transgender. Before long, everything pushed by the left - from climate change lunacy to transgender psychosis - will be rooted in sheer delusion that stands in complete contradiction to scientific reality.
Yet it will all be pushed by Facebook as “verified fact.” To the utterly insane left, “facts” are whatever they believe in, no matter how disconnected from reality they might be.
We have now entered the Orwellian nightmare we all knew was coming. The good news is that you can simply change the channel and escape the nightmare by avoiding Facebook altogether.
Facebook Jumps On ‘Fake News’ Fact-Checker Train, Will ‘Roll Out’ With PolitiFact
Facebook announced Thursday that it is ready to “roll out” a process by which alleged “fake news” is identified and flagged for users.
Concern for so-called “fake news,” which has permeated the media landscape since Democrat Hillary Clinton’s Election Day loss to Republican Donald Trump, will now be met by Facebook in a major way.
The social media giant’s newsroom announced that it will partner with third-party organizations to identify hoaxes and unreliable stories.
“We believe providing more context can help people decide for themselves what to trust and what to share,” the company said.
“We’ve started a program to work with third-party fact checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations.”
According to Facebook, “if the fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed.”
Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s company said its workforce and partners “cannot become arbiters of truth” while essentially designating them as such. One of the organizations Facebook plans on teaming up with is Snopes, which bills itself as an “essential resource” for truth.
Others groups the social media platform will work with include ABC News, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and The Associated Press.
Conservative commentators were quick to put forth a “who watches the watchmen” counter-argument.
“Sometimes the experts are also partisans who have an agenda. That was certainly the case with regard to Obamacare,” wrote Hotair’s John Sexton on Thursday.
“Health care wonks like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Gruber knew a great deal about the program.
They were also prepared to help their Democratic allies in government lie to the public if necessary to see it succeed. It’s not that they didn’t know the truth it’s just that they weren’t going to share all of it (except occasionally to a friendly audience).
Now imagine applying these new rules retroactively to this story. Would any story which challenged Obama’s statement be flagged as ‘fake news’ prior to 2013?”
“Two university studies show PolitiFact rates the GOP as liars over Democrats at a rate of 3 to 1 and 2 to 1 respectively. […] I once asked the head of PolitiFact to explain a university study suggesting they were biased,” Mr. Hemingway said in a series of tweets.
“He no joke told me that based on what people tell him at parties he thinks he’s fair. I could go on … but the idea of PolitiFact censoring political speech at any major social media network is horrifying.”
Facebook, for all intents and purposes, dismissed such concerns as hyperbole over a work-in-progress with good intentions.
“We’re excited about this progress, but we know there’s more to be done,” the company wrote. “We’re going to keep working on this problem for as long as it takes to get it right.”
Why Now? Tangled Webs: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, The Internet Giveaway, And The Wild, Wild West Of Information December 17 2016 | From: AmericanPolicy
The use of lies and deception, or as the new term coming into vogue; fake news, has been a standard tool of the trade for over a century by the government and their willing and/or unwilling stooges in the mainstream media.
A few examples include Newspaper owners William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, with the unspoken blessings of US President, William McKinley, spreading lies to stir up the masses enough to start a war with Spain.
This allowed McKinley to start an American empire by taking over the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico at the close of the 19th century. In the following decades, the media has obediently followed along coving up such things as the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident, the governmental attack on the Branch Davidians, 9/11, and the Obamacare fiasco.
In spite of the lies and distortions presented by the government then spread by an obedient media, there were still some journalists who were doing their job by reporting the truth.
In 1983, fifty companies controlled 90% of the American media, today it is just six multinational corporations. They are Viacom, Comcast, Time-Warner, Disney, CBS, and News Corp and these companies are working very hard to make sure that the news you hear is the news they and the government want you to hear.
From the anti-Muslim video that “caused” the killing of four Americans at Benghazi, lying about the state of the economy before the 2008 meltdown, to the massive push to promote Obamacare, the main stream media is relentless in pushing the government / corporatist agenda to its audience.
This control is the dream of every tyrannical state in history and the US government has almost achieved it.
Only, they have, like the American Army in the WWII Battle of Arnhem, pushed their power too far and too fast causing the American people to no longer trust the main stream media.
In the spring of 2016, a major poll was conducted by the Media Insight Project, a partnership of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute; they found that just 6% of those polled have confidence in the main stream media for news.
The bias and outright lies have become so bad that even a 30 year insider like Sharyl Attkisson commented on it:
“There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere. By well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations. I think all of that comes into play.”
“ICANN is arguably the single most powerful institution in the world” - Jeff Baron
In every format, the main stream media is losing patrons. From failing newspapers to falling television ratings, the old model is dying because of the internet.
The Internet has become the primary source for information for a huge percentage of Westerners today.
In fact, in the last 25 years the internet has transformed the world. It has completely revamped the way people do business, communicate, purchase household goods, plan vacations, find friends, look up information and just about every human activity imaginable.
Since it first became available for average people, the internet has been a way to find information the elites did not want exposed and they have been looking to shut down that freedom of information for years.
Subsequently with the support of numerous multinational corporations like Microsoft, Google, Dell, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook along with the blessing from globalist mouth pieces like the Council on Foreign Relations, the LA Times, NBC, the International Chamber of Commerce and Human Rights Watch, President Obama failed to renew the contract with ICANN effectively giving the control over the internet to a private company.
That company is ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and it is a CA based nonprofit corporation. In 1998, the Commerce Department began contracting with ICANN, to take over management of IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and the internet’s domain name system.
The US Commerce Department has, for the most part, let ICANN govern itself, but it maintained the authority to pull the nonprofit’s contract.
In essence ICANN records the numbers (easier for computers to use) using words (easier for humans to use) through DNS.
Domain name system (DNS) is basically a directory for internet-connected devices that helps translate domain names to numerical IP addresses. Without DNS it is difficult for people to access websites as it requires remembering large numbers of IP address, a series of numbers such as “194.66.82.10”.
So President Obama just ceded power over the allocation of domain names from Google.com to your church’s website without the consent of Congress and over the objections of millions of citizens.
Those supporting the transfer are quick to report that there is nothing to fear from this transfer, after all ICANN is a “private” company under a global multi-stakeholder group to oversee its Board of Directors. What can possibly go wrong with the internet in the hands of a “private” company? Plenty.
ICANN is first and foremost, a complete monopoly. It has exclusive rights to allow and renew domain names and that is a power it has not always been used benevolently.
It also has complete control over how much to charge for a top level domain such as .com, .net, .biz and several times in the past, it has abused those powers.
For instance it allowed a top level domain named .sucks to be purchased by the company Vox Populi which charges $2,500 to protect a company’s or individuals name from being purchased and slandered with a .sucks after it, then failed to rein the company in when it was running an extortion operation.
ICANN has also been accused numerous times of siding with those who have the most to pay its fees and since it costs over a million dollars to have ICANN officially look into a complaint, not many decisions are overturned.
Another troubling aspect of ICANN is that ICANN has made a fortune off of its rapidly expanding list of Generic Top Level Domain Names (gTLDs). Names like .lawyer; .google; .africa are going for at least $200,000 each and then annual fees.
The .web domain brought $135,000,000 into their coffers giving them not only a complete monopoly on issuing domains but the means to create a very monopolistic self-supporting group of elites.
Amazon, the giant online retailer, applied to register the gTLD .amazon. ICANN has written limitations that govern the sale of a domain name but since the name .amazon does not fall, into any of the categories that are forbidden there should have no problems with Amazon’s request.
Only there was, the South American countries of Brazil and Peru, through the interest group Government Advisory Committee (GAC), declared this application to be illegal, based on the fact that the Amazon River is a geographical area inhabited by some 30million people.
ICANN sided with the governments proving that the advantage of being a monopoly is that you get to make up rules as you go along. Amazon is now in the process of suing ICANN over the matter.
The exact same thing happened to the sports company called Patagonia when it filed for the .patagonia domain. The governments of Argentina and Chile objected and ICANN decided against selling the name to the company.
This trend shows that not only are rules made to be broken but governments are meant to be appeased.
This pattern is more than disturbing considering that since 1998, nations that routinely censor the internet of their citizens including Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have pushed extremely hard to place the functions of ICANN under the control of the U.N.’s Russian dominated International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and President Obama may very well have just handed them their chance.
For, as stated above, ICANN holds a COMPLETE monopoly over the World Wide Web root zone and complete monopolies in private hands are illegal in most of the world. When operating under contract with the Commerce Department, ICANN becomes a legal monopolist as it becomes an “instrumentality” of government.
As L. Gordon Crovitz points out in his article “U.S. Surrender: Internet Giveaway to the U.N.?,” once ICANN became independent, they lost that umbrella of US Government protection leaving them open to legal challenges from every despotic government on earth looking to force them under the control of the United Nations.
Hence President Obama, in another case of: “if you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor;
“Simply lied again when he pledged that ICANN would not replace U.S. control for a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.”
This fact is verified on 10/14/16 When Obama gave a speech in Pittsburg, PA in which he glorified the days of the three major networks delivering the news that most people trusted.
Obama went on to say:
“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to.
There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added.
“That is hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible. The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it.” he added.
There should be no longer any doubt as to why Obama went against Congress and the people to give away the internet; we can no longer have the “wild-wild-west-of-information flow” out there to inform the people of what is really going on in the world.
“Look at the European parliament. There are a lot of people who are looking for simplistic solutions and are preaching simplistic solutions which are very unfriendly policies. We have them here in Europe; too, we have them in Germany too.”
“Digitization is a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change and transformation in society. Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what kind of consequences it had, or industrialization, what consequences that had.”
“Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies and it took a while until societies learned to find the right kinds of policies to contain this, to manage and steer this. We live in a period of profound transformation.”
Directing her ire against the Germans who are angered with her flooding Germany with Muslim invaders and massive job loss, she lashed out against PEGIDA, the anti-mass migration and counter-Islamisation movement, repeating their slogan: ‘Wir Sind Das Volk’ - ‘We Are The People’ - the chancellor said:
“The most important and noble task of politicians these days is to see that each and every person can find his place. But those who purportedly belong to certain groups say ‘we are the people, and not others’.”
In another of those frequent ironies so often dumped on the citizens, Merkel, a former (?) East German communist, now says of PEGIDA:
“At the time when we had [this saying] in the GDR [East Germany] when the people stood in the streets and said ‘we are the people’ it filled me with great joy, but the fact these people have hijacked it does not fill me with joy.”
How long will it be before other world leaders join Ms. Merkel and president Obama in demanding web censorship?
Certainly foreign media is now calling for it as Germany’s Zeit newspaper published a piece calling for controls to prevent “a German Donald Trump”, while Britain’s Independent former newspaper website published a list of “fake” news sites which they claimed may have “swayed votes towards Donald Trump”.
Even the British news outlet “The Guardian” is in on the fake news bandwagon. That list is the same list being circulated by Google and Facebook.
Consequently, now, the very instrument that has become the great equalizing force against corporatism/globalism’s control over the main stream media might now become just another weapon in their arsenal of global censorship.
Unfortunately, it is only one of several ways the internet is being manipulated for corporatist/governmental advantage. One only needs to look at the two most popular search engines and the most popular social media site to see complete censorship in action.
What kind of drug does one have to take to believe Microsoft is a friend? - Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Google, Bing and Facebook have an unbroken record of suppressing sites, postings and searches that don’t follow their world view. Of the three, Bing is certainly the smallest but being part of Microsoft, perhaps they try harder. Bing claims to be neutral and in fact, the subscriber can set the search engine to their own preference of conservative; liberal; Christian; etc. so how can they be biased?
Well the Bing headline on August 16, 2016 for the conservative bias setting in Bing featured three negative Trump articles:
– Donald Trump plots strategy on ISIS - and campaign revival (CNN)
– Analysis: Making Sense of Donald Trump’s Disjointed Foreign Policy Pitch (NBC News)
– Early Voting Limits Donald Trump’s Time to Turn Campaign Around (New York Times)
The first headline implies Trump’s campaign had stalled and needs revival. The second inferred Trump’s foreign policy was chaotic and the third noted that the early vote will give Hillary such a lead that discouraged Trump supporters won’t vote.
Microsoft, donated $650,000 to the Hillary Clinton campaign and both Bill and Melinda Gates were considered as possible Vice Presidential running mates for her Presidential campaign.
This is the Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, whose obsession with globalism and censorship is well known and on Sept. 20, 2016 at a conference in Vancouver, B.C. he openly stated that opposition to globalism is “a huge concern,” and says the underlying issues of resistance to it warrant a close examination.
This is the same Bill Gates that along with Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in early 2015 on the critical need for immigration and more H-1B visas because of a shortage of high tech workers, and then laid off some 18,000 American high tech workers.
In 2010, China demanded that Google and Microsoft censor the results of their search engines in China.
Google resisted but Microsoft was more than willing to go along. Bill Gates even criticized Google’s decision to uncensor their search engine in China by saying:
“You’ve got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there.”
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer then said “If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we’ll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping also stopped in for dinner at Bill Gates house in September of 2015 before meeting with the heads of Microsoft, Google and Facebook amongst other business leaders.
So great is the Bing Censorship of China that the Chinese Web anti-censorship monitoring service has gone to great lengths to show that Bing censors content in China even more than the Chinese State owned search engine” Baidu” does. But don’t worry; Microsoft’s support of the ICANN was completely in the name of a “free” internet.
Privacy is no longer a “social norm.” - Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook is just as bad. In addition to being an outspoken advocate of globalism and a liberal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the controlling force behind the most powerful social media platform ever created. Facebook controls the global dialogue used by over a billion people with an invisible touch that is unprecedented.
Almost two-thirds of American adults get news from social media, with 44% of them getting their news from Facebook alone.
This means Facebook’s algorithms dominate the information of almost half the American public. As Gizmodo’s Michael Nuñez puts it, “with Facebook, we don’t know what we’re not seeing.”
And he controls that platform with an iron grip.
Facebook has conducted numerous studies to better understand how information spreads in a social network. For instance, in 2010 Facebook conducted a secret experiment on 61 million unknowing people by tampering with their news feeds to find out how successfully it could manipulate the real-world voting habits of those people.
Later, Facebook released the findings and claimed that they increased voter turnout by more than 340,000 people. Facebook regularly skews the news it posts; in 2012 it manipulated the feeds on 700,000 people without their consent to make them feel sad and then published the results in the respected (?) scientific journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
The results showed fairly conclusively that Facebook had found the key to intentionally influencing people’s emotions. That year they did the same type of experiment on 1.9 million people to influence the US election. In 2014 Facebook used the rainbow flag as another experiment to get people to be more accepting of same-sex marriage.
Facebook has made an empire of selling information about every person they can. It openly manipulates the feeds and posts they allow on Facebook and the posts people are allowed to place for other members of Facebook.
Facebook is now “reluctantly” being “forced” to manipulate their algorithm to crack down on “fake” news being posted on Facebook.
Though this sounds like a noble goal, the potential for censorship is unmistakable, especially when one looks at the list of websites they plan on censoring.
The sites Facebook and Google are going to censor as “fake” was created by a self-proclaimed feminist assistant professor at Merrimack College who did not like the sites her students citing in their research papers.
Sites like Breitbart; Realfarmacy; Lew Rockwell; Zerohedge; and World Net Daily.
Though all have posted articles that have proven to be false, Facebook has no problem with posting articles from even less reliable news site like USA Today; MSNBC; CNN; BBC and the New York Times. Google is now planning on using this same list to censor content. It does not take a rocket scientist to see where this censorship is headed.
In fact, in one of the most blatant acts of “fake news” to ever hit the news media was perpetrated by the New York Times in early 1957, when a former war correspondent, Herbert L. Matthews, wrote numerous articles filled with the glories and praises of a young Cuban revolutionary named Fidel Castro.
Article after article spewing from Matthews’ typewriter glowed with tales that eventually created a Robin Hood persona for a murdering communist thug. It cannot be understated how important the “fake news” was to propel Castro into power. Yet the New York Times stands as a purveyor of honest journalism according to our Ministry of “truth.”
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” - Eric Schmidt
The last of the big three masters of manipulation is Google, and they are arguably the biggest of the bunch. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is about as open with his liberal bias as one could ever be. The Bilderberg attendee bankrolled a startup company called “The Groundwork” to provide technical experts Hillary Clinton needed to run her campaign. Schmidt was instrumental in getting Barack Obama elected both times as he was the main supplier of technical experts for all three campaigns.
Technology is right up Schmidt’s alley as Google is the defacto gateway to information. Google averages some 40,000 search queries every second equaling over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
Google conducts over 64% of all internet searches in the US and over 90% in some countries. Google has indexed some 45 billion web pages while Bing, its closest competitor has only 14 billion.
Of course the 45 billion web pages are only part of the Schmidt plan to control everything on earth. Schmidt has stated that privacy is an excuse to hide wrongdoing:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
In his plan to deprive you of your privacy, Schmidt has employed some of the world’s top technocrats to find ever more powerful ways to pry into every corner of your life since Google’s business is, literally, mass surveillance, and they have become amazingly good at it.
They are also a contractor to the US Government, including the NSA and several military contractors as well. When Edward Snowden revealed to the world the unimaginable world of government spying on US citizens, he also revealed that the NSA has direct access to the information stored on Google’s computers as they do to Facebook, Twitter, Bing and every other company storing online information on you.
In a US News and World Report article published on 6/22/16, contributor Robert Epstein wrote an extremely troubling article on just how powerful Google is. According to Epstein:
“When Google’s employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, it causes opinions and votes to shift, reputations to be ruined and businesses to crash and burn.
Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed.”
Epstein then exposes blacklists that Google wields like Jack the Ripper did his knives with the first being the autocomplete blacklist. This one is simple enough; it quietly guides the searcher to where the company wants you to go.
From directing away from negative articles on Hillary Clinton to pointing to negative articles on Donald Trump, there is little doubt that Google had a large impact on the recent US election. In any search you make, the algorithm is your spiritual guide.
Google maps is a stalker’s dream showing just about every house and area in the US and huge sections of the world. They did not ask for permission to film your house, they just did it.
Military installations and a few other places are excluded but chances are, your house is there.
Google’s You Tube blacklist allows users to tag certain clips as inappropriate and Google’s censors may or may not remove them.
However, You Tube is notorious for removing politically and morally conservative videos on a regular basis while never doing the same to liberal videos. They are also willing to work with foreign governments to determine which videos will be allowed to be shown in the country.
The Google account blacklist can cut people’s access to their own email account as well as You Tube and other Google products without any notice or recourse.
The Google News blacklist is insidious in every way. They are the biggest news aggregator on the planet, tracking tens of thousands of news sources daily and converting them to numerous languages.
They have been accused on numerous occasions of excluding conservative news feeds as well as certain writers and competing companies. This is an incredibly powerful and nearly unnoticeable tool to promote political, moral and/or religious agenda.
Google Adwords blacklist is how Google gets the lion’s share of its money (some $56 billion annually) by selling keywords to the highest bidders.
These keywords are how the website is found by searchers so if your site does not have them, you are going to sink. On numerous occasions, Google has simply deleted those keywords on sites effectively making them invisible and financially crushing them.
The search engine blacklist is a make or break situation for many web pages. Google, for many unknown reasons will push web page down the list of rankings effectively ruining many businesses in a very short time.
The power to “blacklist” a site is Google’s most dreaded weapon however. Google claims this power is to keep the internet free from malicious malware which, they claim is a public service. The problems with this argument are many however. Google’s crawlers often make mistakes, blacklisting websites that do not contain malware.
Because of how extensively Google crawls the web, all the other main search engines use their “blacklist” which means that once on the list, the site is effectively cut off from public access.
Google has used this power on numerous occasions on people they do not like.
Google even profits from this arrangement as they collect information from every user that accesses Google’s results and then sells it. Google has, for all intents and purposes, become the internet police man and they use this power to further their globalist agenda on a regular basis and it is now supporting the same list of “fake” news sites that the British Independent and Facebook are touting.
Google, Microsoft and Facebook have all three censored users on the behest of world governments and all three; have consistently censored users for no apparent reason. They, along with Twitter (another social media monster) sided with Obama to give away America’s right the control the internet.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
Tragically, the US now finds every purveyor of media has been compromised and censored by those with globalist views. Once ICANN loses its independence to the UN, the corporatist/governmental takeover will be complete.
Controlling access to information is every tyrant’s dream and our government is no different.
The main stream media did a masterful job of concealing the 2008 economic meltdown from the masses just like they have the corruption of Hillary Clinton; the imploding Deutsche Bank; the growing threat of nuclear war with Russia; the threat of an EMP from North Korea and now the escalating violence of the Clinton supporters after the election of Donald Trump.
It was only the access of the people to alternative news sites that alerted and continue to alert those willing to listen to truth that news of these events get out at all.
Post-election America is now a powder keg awaiting a spark. The Green Party candidate for President, Jill Stein, started a fund to recount the votes in three states in hopes of overturning the election of Donald Trump and now Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has joined her in what is only going to create a greater rift in our already shredded national tapestry.
This is only a part of the drama as now; the Washington Post has publically called the Drudge Report, Zero Hedge and former Congressman Ron Paul agents of Russian Propaganda. As if on cue, the call has come from numerous governments on the spread of “hate speech” in the US and the call to regulate it.
Which Mark Zukerberg is only too happy to oblige as he outlined a seven point plan to help stop the “spread” of “fake news” on Facebook. So convincing is this “fake news” that it fools most students a new “study” finds which of course means that our very Ministry of Truth will need to decipher it for us. In fact, the media is now calling on the FBI to investigate the “fake news” without a shred of evidence to support them.
With a growing population of closed minded bigots unwilling to even listen to opposing opinions or facts, the US is slowly returning to the Dark Ages with only a few sources controlling access to information.
Freedom loving people everywhere should all be asking themselves why this particular time was chosen for Obama to open the door for the UN takeover of an already censored internet.
It is past time to look into a ham radio and other forms of communication that cannot be controlled by the elites. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have an excellent source for information called the “Radio Free Redoubt.”
Time is of the essence as the days of the open internet are coming to a rapid close.
“Hell is truth seen too late.”Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
19. Patrick Lang: 
“Fake Scholarship” and the Future of America’s University
David Rockefeller, banker and philanthropist, dies at 101
In Arizona, police would be permitted to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that at some point becomes violent. 
CURRENT AFFAIRS
“Recognizing Traffic Data and digital profiling”
December 14:
But Microsoft, which regularly credits researchers who discover holes in its products, curiously would not say who had tipped the company off to the issue. Many suspected that the United States government itself had told Microsoft, after the N.S.A. realized that its hacking method exploiting the vulnerability had been stolen. 
