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Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

“No president from either party should have the sole power to shut down or take control of the internet or any other of our communication channels during an emergency.”—Senator Rand Paul

What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?

After all, it’s happening all over the world.

Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

As the Guardian reports, “From Ukraine to Myanmar, government-run internet outages are picking up pace around the world. In 2021, there were 182 shutdowns in 34 countries… Countries across Africa and Asia have turned to shutdowns in a bid to control behaviour, while India, largely in the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, plunged into digital darkness more times than any other last year… Civil unrest in Ethiopia and Kazakhstan has triggered internet shutdowns as governments try to prevent political mobilisation and stop news about military suppression from emerging.”

In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.

Tyrants and would-be tyrants rely on this “cloak of darkness” to advance their agendas.

In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”

…click on the above link to read the rest…

US Special Operations Command Will Deploy Argus AI Program to Scour Social Media for Disinformation, Misinformation and Malinformation, National Security Authority to Protect U.S. Internet from “Pain Points”

Annnd… Here we go.  If you have not read the background {Go Deep}, you will not have the appropriate context to absorb the latest revelation about how the Dept of Defense will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security.

Gee, who would have predicted that U.S. internet operations would suddenly have a totally new set of enhanced AI guardians at the gateways? ????

Read Carefully – Eyes Wide Open:

The US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media.

The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats.

“Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes, and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan said.

“Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.

“USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognizing the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”

But wait… It gets worse!

 

[PRIVATE SECTOR VERSION] – The company also revealed that it will launch an enterprise version of Argus Social for disinformation detection later this year.

The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Google Manipulates Results as Searches ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’ Explode Due to Collapsing Covid Narrative

psychosis

Google Manipulates Results as Searches ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’ Explode Due to Collapsing Covid Narrative

Those paying attention to the current situation regarding the establishment’s control on the narrative around Covid-19, have watched as anyone — including esteemed experts in the field — are censored into oblivion for attempting to put forth information that challenges the status quo. For the first time in recent American history, merely talking about alternative treatments for a disease is met with mass censorship by big tech. This is diametrically opposed to actual “science” and the opposite direction in which a free society should be moving.

One of the people who has been censored the most is Robert W Malone MD, MS who is one of the inventors of mRNA & DNA vaccines. Dr. Malone has been outspoken about the way the establishment system is handling, or rather mishandling, the covid crisis.

His Twitter account had grown to over a half million followers last week before the platform decided that his alternative views on the pandemic were a danger to the narrative. So they banned him.

Instead of standing up for the free exchange of ideas by experts — which is how science works  — the left cheered for Malone’s censorship, calling him a kook while celebrating the tools of tyrants.

Before Donald Trump came into office and caused mass hysteria over Russia, the left used to stand for freedom of speech. However, the flamboyant tyrant in the White House quickly eroded their respect for rights. Then, in 2020, Covid-19 arrived and the censorship campaign switched into overdrive.

The left — armed with their militant “fact checkers” whose opinions are wielded like swords against anyone who challenges the official narrative — became the regime of authoritarian information controllers. After all, if you challenge their messiahs like Dr. Fauci, you challenge science itself — facts be damned.

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

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Listen to a reading of this article:

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written manymany articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

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

How to escape Google

How to escape Google

The US search engine market in 2019 (SparkToro)

Published: November 25, 2021 (upd.)
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Do you belong to the 94% of Internet users who have no clue?

Google Search has a US online search market share of about 70%, or even 94% if Google Images, Google Maps and Google-owned YouTube are added (see chart above).

If you belong to these 94%, there is some bad news for you.

As a well-known US podcaster recently discovered, Google is indeed “hiding information” from its users. This has actually been known for many years, but it has become especially obvious and serious during the coronavirus pandemic.

In fact, censorship by Google has become so bad that nowadays, advanced Internet users are using Google primarily to monitor the current extent of censorship, not to actually search for anything. US researcher Dr. Robert Epstein termed it the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME).

Of note, Google censorship affects not just search results, but even search suggestions. In other words, Google is first manipulating what you search for, only to then additionally manipulate what results you will get. It is well worth trying this out yourself to appreciate the effect (see below).

What is Google hiding from you? In short, they are hiding “non-authoritative sources”. In other words, they are hiding stuff those in power don’t want you to know or to even think of.

This is not all that surprising, since Google initially was a research and startup project funded and supported by US intelligence and the military to “retain information superiority”.

Essentially, Google Search has become an online prison library.

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

UK Considering Legislation That Would Imprison Internet Trolls

UK Considering Legislation That Would Imprison Internet Trolls

This blatant attempt at the censorship of online speech is deeply concerning.

If you ever need a reminder of how important freedom of speech is, all you need to do is look across the pond. The United Kingdom, which doesn’t have a First Amendment, has slowly seen citizens’ free speech rights eroded—and now may soon start imprisoning people for being trolls on the internet.

At question is pending legislation called the “Online Safety Bill,” which ostensibly punishes social media companies that allow harassment. Yet it may be expanded to include new criminal penalties for individuals who engage in mean speech online.

“Trolls could face two years in prison for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm under legislation targeting online hate,” the Times of London reports. “The Department for Culture, Media & Sport has accepted recommendations from the Law Commission for crimes to be based on ‘likely psychological harm.’ The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the ‘harmful effect’ of a message rather than if it contains ‘indecent’ or ‘grossly offensive’ content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.”

Other offenses will reportedly be created for “knowingly false communication,” applying to those who “send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience.” The new offenses will also include punishment for social-media “pile-ons,” where groups gang up and are rude to people online.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is reportedly planning on adding these provisions to the Online Safety Bill when it’s introduced in Parliament next month.

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

Pierre Omidyar’s Financing of the Facebook “Whistleblower” Campaign Reveals a Great Deal

Pierre Omidyar’s Financing of the Facebook “Whistleblower” Campaign Reveals a Great Deal

The internet is the last remaining instrument for dissent and free discourse to thrive outside state and oligarchical control. This campaign aims to put an end to that.

Pierre Omidyar, Founder of eBay, and Publisher of the Intercept looks on during the final session of the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, on Thursday, September 23, 2010. (Photo by Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images)

It is completely unsurprising to learn, as Politico reported last Wednesday, that the major financial supporter of Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen’s sprawling P.R. and legal network coordinating her public campaign is the billionaire founder of EBay, Pierre Omidyar. The Haugen Show continues today as a consortium of carefully cultivated news outlets (including those who have been most devoted to agitating for online censorship: the New York Times’ “tech” unit and NBC News’s “disinformation” team) began publishing the trove of archives she took from Facebook under the self-important title “The Facebook Papers,” while the star herself has traveled to London to testify today to British lawmakers considering a bill to criminally punish tech companies that allow “foul content” or “extremism” — whatever that means — to be published.

On Sunday, Haugen told The New York Times that her own personal Bitcoin wealth means she is relying on “help from nonprofit groups backed by Mr. Omidyar only for travel and similar expenses.” But the paper also confirmed that the firm masterminding Haugen’s public campaign roll-out and complex media strategy, a group “founded by the former Barack Obama aide Bill Burton,” is “being paid by donors, including the nonprofit groups backed by Mr. Omidyar.”…

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

What If The Next Major Cyberattack Targeted The Internet?

What If The Next Major Cyberattack Targeted The Internet?

Over the past few months I have been writing analysis on a planned crisis war game organized by the World Economic Forum called “Cyberpolygon.” The event will be held this week on July 9th, and it’s allegedly designed to simulate a massive cyberattack that somehow disrupts the global supply chain, or at the very least disrupts the supply chain of multiple large economies.

Why am I so interested in this war game? Well, many of my readers will recall that the last major simulation the WEF and the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation held was Event 201, a global pandemic exercise which portrayed a coronavirus outbreak spread by animal carriers to humans killing millions of people while forcing the shutdown of multiple first-world economies. Event 201 was scheduled for October 2019 – two months later the exact pandemic scenario they simulated happened in real life, save a few minor details.

Klaus Schwab, the head of the WEF, was very quick to exploit the COVID-19 outbreak as a rationale for the “Great Reset” agenda: A socialist reconstruction of the world’s financial system and political structure that globalists have been clamoring for since at least 2014. Truly, the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic were the same people that simulated the outbreak only months beforehand during Event 201.

So, of course many people are beginning to wonder if lightning will strike twice for the globalists at the WEF. Will there be a large scale cyberattack that brings down the international supply chain within the next few months? Will there be another miraculous coincidence that destabilizes the world’s trade systems and creates social strife?

Cyber-terrorism is already disrupting the economy

There have already been a few disturbing near-crisis cyberattacks in the past month.

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

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

Listen to a reading of this article:

The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

 

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

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

Websites Come Back Online After Global Fastly Outage

Websites Come Back Online After Global Fastly Outage

Update (0845ET): All of Fastly’s services appear operational, and the global CDN disruption has been resolved.

Let’s hope so… 

* * *

Update (0736ET): After an hour of websites and apps worldwide went dark, many are coming back online around 0730 ET. The core problem was an “issue” identified on the Fastly CDN (content delivery network) network.

Popular websites such as Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify, which Fastly runs a content delivery network to push data around the internet, went down around 0600 ET. With so many websites relying on Fastly’s technology to act as a high-level website and application hosting service to serve millions of users, the internet breaks when their servers go down.

There are many similarities between this outage and an issue with Cloudflare last year.

The point here is to have the entire internet rely on a single point of failure like Fastly and Cloudflare could be something hackers may exploit.

* * *

Update (0708ET): Fastly issued a new update that reads: “The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return.” 

So problem fixed? 

* * *

Update (0650ET): Fastly has identified the issues and a fix is being implemented.

How long until the Russians are blamed? 

*  * *

Update (0646ET): Many websites are down this morning due to a CDN failure. The issue appears to be originating at the Fastly CDN network. We listed websites currently experiencing problems in an earlier update, such as RedditTwitch, PayPal, etc…

According to Bloomberg, the Fastly CDN (content delivery network) network experienced issues around 11:00 local time in the UK that disrupted internet data worldwide, preventing people from writing on forums, shopping online, watching videos, and using apps and websites.

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

Schwab Wants a Digital Citizenship to Use the Internet

The World Economic Forum recently ran a Livestream with Interpol, Cloudflare, and a cybersecurity firm to discuss the upcoming cyber pandemic agenda, which many believe will be their next step to justify creating a Digital Citizenship to be able to even use the internet. Cloudflare’s COO who is advises on digital identity/citizenship for internet users. You want to associate everything you do on the Internet with a digital ID. Here is Cloudfare’s COO Michelle Zatlyn casually talking about 100% security which will be used to block anyone in this cancel culture that they disagree with.

This is the problem with the left. They always need to control everyone else to make the world the way they see it. There is never any respect for human rights. They reject the very idea of the United States Constitution or the Declaration of Independence – that we were all created equal. This road they always go down has been attempted so many times. Lenin ignored culture and humanity and tried to make everyone the same. It was humanity itself that he waged war against. These people are doing the very same thing. To them, we must all be controlled.

I do not recommend doing ANY business with ANY company that teams up with the WEF.

Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities

Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities

The riots, political turmoil, and other banana republic embarrassments seem to be ending – for now. So let’s get back to examining the real problems of this hyper-leveraged, dangerously-complex world. Like how big cities might soon be obsolete:

Pretend it’s 2019 and you’re living in a major US city. You, your spouse and two kids have a fairly nice (though admittedly very expensive) apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood, and life is pretty good. There’s a park nearby, dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, and plenty of interesting friends. And of course your high-paying jobs are right there.

Then comes 2020. A pandemic causes your mayor to panic and lock down the city. There go the park, friends, and restaurants. And before the horror of this new normal has a chance to sink in, civil unrest explodes and turns your once-iconic neighborhood into a Mad Maxian war zone of burned-out cars and boarded up storefronts.

If it was just you, you might stick it out. But with a family, this life is now untenable. So you look into moving, preferably to somewhere semi-rural where neither a lockdown nor riots will ever be a problem and the kids can actually play outside. Maybe it’s time to indulge your fantasy of working remotely from a homestead in a gorgeous place.

But you immediately hit a technological speed bump: Broadband Internet, which up to this point had seemed both ubiquitous and a basic human right, isn’t available on the homesteads you now covet. The only option out there is low-tech, unreliable, molasses-slow satellite Internet that, if the reviews are to be believed, is worse than nothing at all.

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

 

FireEye and US Treasury Department hacked, Russia blamed

FireEye and US Treasury Department hacked, Russia blamed

Security consulting company FireEye has been hacked and their “Red Team” tools, which was their proprietary intrusion detection and testing toolkit has been stolen. In a blog post about the incident the company attributed the breach to a highly skilled nation state actor possessing “world class capabilities.” FireEye’s clients include agencies at all levels of government and Fortune 500 companies globally.

“The stolen “red team” tools — which amount to real-world malware — could be dangerous in the wrong hands,”

FireEye in an effort to mitigate the damage potential of the toolkits being in the wild, giving security teams the ability to build out defences against them.

The attack is being widely attributed to Russia (which I have to admit, kinda gets an eyeroll from me)

As I was writing this, a Washington Post article also trotted out Russian hackers in a piece about a breach at the US Treasury Department which cited, as its source material a one sentence report from Reuters. The entire Reuters report is as follows:

“A sophisticated hacking group backed by a foreign government stole information from the U.S. Treasury Department and a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications, according to people familiar with the matter.”

From this sentence, Washington Post ran a story that starts out with “Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments”  attributing the allegation to  “people familiar with the matter.”

Read: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-cyber-amazoncom-idUSL1N2IT0HS

I find it frustrating that the mainstream media bias is always quick to blame things on Russia and slow to acknowledge documented hostile behaviour from China. It’s just kind of strange.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Privacy Commissioner Launches Investigation of RCMP Internet Unit

Privacy Commissioner Launches Investigation of RCMP Internet Unit

The probe comes after Tyee reports on Project Wide Awake and web spying. Here are some questions to pose to the force.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has launched an investigation into the RCMP’s Tactical Internet Operational Support unit and Project Wide Awake, the unit’s advanced web monitoring program using digital tools it kept secret.

The office is probing “the RCMP’s collection of the personal information of Canadians under Project Wide Awake,” deputy commissioner Brent Homan of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner confirmed in writing to NDP MP Charlie Angus.

Angus, a member of the parliamentary Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, called for an investigation in a letter sent Nov. 23, following Tyee reports exposing Project Wide Awake and related programs at the RCMP.

“I have grave concerns about the level of secrecy and duplicity the RCMP has gone through to hide their activities into procuring and using these tools to gather information on Canadians,” said Angus in the letter.

He added, “I am very concerned that these internal documents appear to contradict how the force characterized Project Wide Awake to your office.”

The files obtained by The Tyee revealed that the RCMP’s Tactical Internet Operational Support unit requested “national security exceptions” which enable it to hide contracts for software it acquired. The force argued if the software was publicly procured, its capabilities might be defeated by people targeted for spying.

At the same time, the RCMP emphasized that its software only seeks “open source” information online, implying that its sources were only those in the public domain.

However, The Tyee investigation reveals that the force may consider any information it can acquire online, by any means, to be “open source.”

Documents show that the RCMP purchased a license for a program that “unlocks” hidden friends for Facebook users who have set their friends to be private. The provider of Web Investigation Search Tool, used by police around the world, discontinued its operation after a Tyee report.

The RCMP also listed “private communications” and those from “political protests” in a diagram of “darknet” sources, which it aimed to target with a “dark web crawler” and monitoring software.

The internal documents obtained by The Tyee also contained references to programs that appear related to digital surveillance but outside of Project Wide Awake, including ones named Cerebro, Sentinel and Search, and a reference to “expansion of biometrics”.

Here are some questions about the RCMP’s Tactical Internet Operational Support unit the privacy commissioner inquiry might seek to resolve:

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

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging: How to Save Your Posts from Catastrophe.

The Unbearable Lightness of Blogging: How to Save Your Posts from Catastrophe.

 Sumerian clay tablet with the text of the poem Inanna and Ebih by the priestess Enheduanna, Writing in cuneiform characters on clay tablets is a little laborious, but it ensures that your text is not vulnerable to accidental erasure: these tablets have survived for more than 5000 years. It is hard to think that the posts of our blogs will survive for so long. But, at least, we should try to protect them from accidental loss or direct attacks. Image from Wikipedia.

I don’t know if it ever happened to you, but a few days ago I lost two post drafts in a rowthe same day. Then I discovered something that I should have known: that Google’s Blogger gives you zero chances to recover your text when you erase it by mistake. No way, impossible, I could have thrown those drafts into a black hole.

No tragedy, but a few hours of work wasted. And that set my mind in motion: why is it that Google, the world’s most powerful Internet company, can’t provide even a minimal file recovery facility in their blogging platform? Call me paranoid, but I think they had something in mind when they structured Blogger the way it is. That is, prone to data loss. Just think of a few characteristics of the shiny new version of Blogger: there is no way to make an automatic backup. There is no trash can from which you can recover erased data. There is no way to disable the automatic saving that operates every two seconds or so, and that virtually guarantees that any mistake you make can’t be reversed. I can’t believe that these are bugs: they have to be features.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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