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“Programmable Digital Currency”: The next stage of the new normal?The war on cash’s endgame is here: money replaced by vouchers subject to complete state control.

October 10, 2021

“Programmable Digital Currency”: The next stage of the new normal?The war on cash’s endgame is here: money replaced by vouchers subject to complete state control.

Building on the bitcoin model, central banks are planning to produce their own “digital currencies”. Removing any and all remaining privacy, granting total control over every transaction, even limiting what ordinary people are allowed to spend their money on.

From the moment bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies first emerged, sold as an independent and alternative medium of exchange outside the financial status quo, it was only a matter of time before the new alternative would be absorbed, modified and redeployed in service of the state.

Enter “Central Bank Digital Currencies”: the mainstream answer to bitcoin.

For those who have never heard of them, “Central Bank Digital Currencies” (CBDCs) are exactly what they sound like, digitized versions of the pound/dollar/euro etc. issued by central banks.

Like bitcoin (and other crypto), the CBDC would be entirely digital, thus furthering the ongoing war on cash. However, unlike crypto, it would not have any encryption preserving anonymity. In fact, it would be totally the reverse, potentially ending the very idea of financial privacy.

Now, you may not have heard much about the CBDC plans, lost as they are in the tangle of the ongoing “pandemic”, but the campaign is there, chugging along on the back pages for months now. There are stories about it from both Reuters and the Financial Times just today. It’s a long, slow con, but a con nonetheless.

The countries where the idea progressed the furthest are China and the UK. The Chinese Digital Yuan has been in development since 2014, and is subject to ongoing and widespread testing. The UK is nowhere near that stage yet, but Chancellor Rishi Sunak is keenly pushing forward a digital pound that the press are calling “Britcoin”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Ring to Rule Us All: A Global Digital Fiat Currency

October 10, 2021

One Ring to Rule Us All: A Global Digital Fiat Currency

We’ve written extensively about the “war on cash.” In a nutshell, governments would love to do away with cash in order to better track and control their citizens. There have been numerous moves closer to a cashless society in recent years, from capping ATM withdrawals to doing away with large-denomination bills. Last year, China launched a digital yuan pilot program and the US has floated moving toward a digital dollar.

We got a first-hand look at what happens when governments restrict access to cash when India plunged into a cash crisis after the country’s government enacted a policy of demonetization in November 2016.

It’s bad enough that various countries are exploring ways to move toward cashlessness, but there’s an even worse scenario — a global digital currency.

Economist Thorsten Polleit compares it to the “master ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings.

The following article was originally published by the Mises Wire. The opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

1.

Human history can be viewed from many angles. One of them is to see it as a struggle for power and domination, as a struggle for freedom and against oppression, as a struggle of good against evil.

That is how Karl Marx (1818–83) saw it, and Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) judged similarly. Mises wrote:

The history of the West, from the age of the Greek Polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. (1}

But unlike Marx, Mises recognized that human history does not follow predetermined laws of societal development but ultimately depends on ideas that drive human action.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Bank Visions of Absolute Control

September 14, 2021

Central Bank Visions of Absolute Control

There’s not much you can do in the year 2021 that doesn’t leave a digital trail. The collusion of big tech and big government has assured this.

Still, there does remain one simple way to elude the busybodies. In fact, one of the last ways to preserve some level of economic privacy is to pay with cash.

Because when you pay with cash the authorities cannot monitor and track what you buy. They don’t know if the cash you pulled from the ATM was stuffed in your mattress, or used to buy groceries or ammo or silver coins. What’s more, the authorities don’t like this.

The control freak central planners want to know what you are buying, and where and when you are buying. They also want to know how much you spend down to the very last cent. A digital dollar, coupled with the abolition of cash, would allow them to do this. Moreover, it would provide them the ability to have full control over every transaction you make.

For example, if a purchase falls outside of the parameters established by the digital dollar’s monitoring algorithm, it could be cancelled on the spot. Should an attempted purchase not align with the buyers social credit score it would not go through. Are you overweight? Then no glazed donuts for you.

To be clear, digital dollars would have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies or decentralized finance. Rather, digital dollars would be issued by the Federal Reserve and would allow the Fed to monitor and control every transaction you make.

Absolute Control

Certainly, with digital dollars, control over how you spend your money could be executed in countless ways. Monthly limits could be placed on how much you’re allowed to spend.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

September 10, 2021

20 Years of Government-Sponsored Tyranny: The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws

September 7, 2021

Facebook or Twitter posts can now be quietly modified by the government under new surveillance laws

A new law gives Australian police unprecedented powers for online surveillance, data interception and altering data. These powers, outlined in the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, raise concerns over potential misuse, privacy and security.

The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes.

The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech and press freedom. Digital Rights Watch calls it a “warrantless surveillance regime” and notes the government ignored the recommendations of a bipartisan parliamentary committee to limit the powers granted by the new law.

What’s more, legal hacking by law enforcement may make it easier for criminal hackers to illegally access computer systems via the same vulnerabilities used by the government.

What’s in the law?

The bill introduces three new powers for law-enforcement agencies:

“data disruption warrants” allow authorities to “disrupt data” by copying, deleting or modifying data as they see fit
“network activity warrants” permit the collection of intelligence from devices or networks that are used, or likely to be used, by subject of the warrant
“account takeover warrants” let agencies take control of an online account (such as a social media account) to gather information for an investigation.

There is also an “emergency authorisation” procedure that allows these activities without a warrant under certain circumstances.

How is this different to previous laws?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Nothing To Hide,” A Poor Excuse To Justify Surveillance

September 7, 2021

“Nothing To Hide,” A Poor Excuse To Justify Surveillance

Many people claim they have nothing to hide and use that as the reason they don’t object to the expanding web of surveillance being weaved over them. These people ignore the fact we are surrendering our right to freedom when we as a society go down this path. The reality is that when someone knows all about you and your deepest thought they gain tremendous power over you. This is directly linked to the ability to control you.This weekend on a short trip I came across a couple of annoying examples of the government dirtying the waters and making our lives more difficult and less free. These include turning parts of the interstate system into a toll road then not taking cash as payment and so-called “photo enforcement” of traffic laws. While many states have gone to using cameras to some extent for enforcing traffic laws, the practice remains highly controversial. Whether it is incorporated in the notion of reducing labor, streamlining the system, or ending counterfeiting or money laundering, the above can complicate our life. Tech is not the gift of freedom many people think. It could be said we are being boxed in and many of our options are not being preserved.

Some People Remain Optimistic

The picture to the right is one of many that appeared when searching for images showing people stand up and fighting. The idea of resisting new rules and mandates placed upon us conflicts with the idea we should all try to go along with what we are being told to do. Some people have even suggested and claimed those resisting the changes fostered upon us be labeled terrorists.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Snowden: Journalism

September 4, 2021

https://youtu.be/oinq1qWbxsw

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy

August 27, 2021

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy

“Under His Eye,” she says. The right farewell.
“Under His Eye,” I reply, and she gives a little nod.

By now you’ve probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth’s proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn’t matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however… As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Insecurity Industry

July 27, 2021

The Insecurity Industry

The greatest danger to national security has become the companies that claim to protect it

1.

The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.

The microphones inside my actual phone, prepped for surgery

Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat.

Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Reports: Pentagon Tracking “Extremist” Web Searches Including “The Truth About Black Lives Matter”

July 22, 2021

Reports: Pentagon Tracking “Extremist” Web Searches Including “The Truth About Black Lives Matter”

“Asking questions, now extremism. Free inquiry, now extremism.”

Alex Wong & Linnea Rheborg /Getty Images

Reports circulating Tuesday reveal that the Pentagon is working with a contractor to track web searches that it describes as indicators of “white supremacy,” citing the phrase “the truth about black lives matter” as one example.

Reports from Defense One and Fox News state that the Pentagon is working with a UK-based company called Moonshot CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) to uncover networks of domestic extremists within the military.

Moonshot regularly works with the notorious ADL, and has ties to former President Obama, as well as the SPLC and George Soros’ Open Foundation, according to the reports.

Moonshot suggests that searching for the “truth about BLM” indicates a belief “that the BLM movement has nefarious motives,” which “is a disinformation narrative perpetuated by White supremacist groups to weaponize anti-BLM sentiment.”

The company further states that while the search phrase initially appears “innocuous,” it isn’t because the phrase has been used to suggest the BLM movement “is in line with the burning and looting of Antifa.”

“These sources echo White supremacist disinformation narratives alleging that BLM protesters are trying to ‘overthrow the republic’ and ‘harm American citizens in a Marxist coup,’ as a means of delegitimizing it,” the Moonshot research states.

So labelling BLM Marxist means you are an extremist, even though the organisation’s own website displays objectives are unequivocally in line with neo-Marxism, and its founders have described themselves as ‘trained Marxists’.

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday night, Vince Coglianese, the editorial director of The Daily Caller discussed the Moonshot contract with the Pentagon, and noted that there is a sustained move within the Biden government to label everything as domestic extremism.

“It’s completely out of control,” Coglianese said, noting “Asking questions, now extremism. Free inquiry, now extremism. It’s getting worse.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency

July 11, 2021

Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency

It’s no secret that Google regularly collaborates with intelligence agencies.

They are a known NSA subcontractor. They launched Google Earth using a CIA spy satellite network. Their executive suite’s revolving door with DARPA is well known.

In the wake of the January 6th Capitol event, the FBI used Google location data to pwn attendants with nothing more than a valid Gmail address and smartphone login:

A stark reminder that carrying a tracking device with a Google login, even with the SIM card removed, can mean the difference between freedom and an orange jump suit in the Great Reset era.

But Google also operates its own internal intelligence agency – complete with foreign regime change operations that are now being applied domestically.

And they’ve been doing so without repercussion for over a decade.

From Google Ideas to Google Regime Change

In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“

Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers (think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).

And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world in their own image.

To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.

He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments they disapproved of.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

June 4, 2021

Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.

Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

RCMP Secret Facial Recognition Tool Looked for Matches with 700,000 ‘Terrorists’

April 28, 2021

RCMP Secret Facial Recognition Tool Looked for Matches with 700,000 ‘Terrorists’

Emails expose the BC force’s previously unknown purchase, which broke rules. Critics worry about privacy, racial profiling and false positives.

Documents obtained by The Tyee identify the BC RCMP as IntelCenter’s first publicly revealed facial recognition service client. The firm’s military, intelligence and law enforcement customers have remained secret until now. Photo by Darryl Dyck, the Canadian Press.

RCMP units in British Columbia broke the force’s own rules when they secretly subscribed to a facial recognition service that claims to help identify terrorists, documents newly obtained by The Tyee show.

Internal emails reveal that in 2016 the RCMP became a client of U.S.-based IntelCenter, whose website boasts of a massive cache of images acquired from various sources online, including social media.

IntelCenter offers enforcement agencies the ability to match against more than 700,000 faces the company says are tied to terrorism.

Until now, military, intelligence and law enforcement customers of the firm’s facial recognition service have remained secret. The BC RCMP units are IntelCenter’s first publicly revealed clients.

To create its software, IntelCenter partnered with a facial recognition tech company named Morpho, later bought and renamed Idemia, which provided biometric services for clients including the FBI, Interpol and the Chinese government.

In documents acquired by The Tyee through access to information requests, the RCMP blanked out its total volume of searches, but the US$20,000 price paid on contracts indicates the force likely purchased thousands of searches annually.

The B.C.-based E Division told The Tyee it bought the software to test its feasibility, and only did so in B.C. The contracts came to an end in 2019, said the BC RCMP. The force’s national headquarters said that it currently has no national contracts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

My New Book on Journalism, Exposing Corruption, and the Resulting Risks, Dangers and Societal Changes

April 14, 2021

My New Book on Journalism, Exposing Corruption, and the Resulting Risks, Dangers and Societal Changes

On Mother’s Day in 2019, I obtained a massive archive of materials from Brazil’s most powerful officials. The reporting we did changed the country, and our lives.

In 2015, I travelled to Sweden for an event with former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. It was billed as a conversation about modern journalism between the reporter who had broken the biggest story of the prior generation (Watergate) and the one responsible for the biggest story of the current one (NSA/Snowden revelations).

A couple of years earlier, at the height of the Snowden reporting, Bernstein and I had traded some barbed insults through the media. So before traveling to Sweden, he generously reached out to invite me to dinner in order, essentially, to clear the air so that we could have a civil conversation. The night before the event, we met for dinner at the hotel restaurant. We quickly laughed off the acrimony — it had been a couple of years prior, and both of us have had much worse said about us — and proceeded to have a perfectly enjoyable conversation.

Truth be told, I was excited to meet and talk to Bernstein. Though his Trump-era persona became conventionally fixated on melodramatizing Trump’s evils for CNN, at the time Bernstein for me was most associated with the high investigative drama of Watergate. As a kid, it was that journalistic triumph, along with the Pentagon Papers, that captured my obsessive attention and shaped my views of what journalism is: reporters and whistleblowers who risk everything and face various multi-level dangers to confront and expose corruption by the most powerful actors in society…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Britain Creating Facial Recognition Database of Everyone!

April 6, 2021

Britain Creating Facial Recognition Database of Everyone!

Boris Johnson has emerged as a ruthless dictator. One must wonder how this man staying in power. There is obviously no politician who cares about his country or the future to dare even move for a no-confidence vote. When our computer has been projecting that the British pound would fall below that of the 1985 low of par $1.03, never in my wildest imagination did I ever expect the prime minister to deliberately destroy his own country. He and his family’s association with Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation and proponents of reducing the world population are most disturbing. Whose grandchildren are they really trying to kill off? Gates had three children so he is obviously only concerned about reducing less intelligent whites and people of non-white origin. It is well known that before Gates would date his wife, he asked he what was her IQ.

Now Boris is after all those who resist his decrees. The Boris Johnson government is now funding companies to produce facial recognition technology that will utilize digital face scans to check people’s vaccination status and allow or block them from entering pubs, stadiums, and other venues. In order to do that, it means everyone who is vaccinated must submit to have their face scanned. People never understand that legislation that says billionaires must now pay a 25% wealth tax because their are billionaires, means that EVERYONE must report everything their own down to their watch and computer to PROVE they are not only of those billionaires.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

martin armstrong, facial recognition, mass surveillance, armstrong economics, britain, boris johnson, big government

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