{"id":25683,"date":"2017-09-15T07:01:06","date_gmt":"2017-09-15T12:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25683"},"modified":"2017-09-15T07:01:06","modified_gmt":"2017-09-15T12:01:06","slug":"state-sponsored-intimidation-or-when-fara-goes-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25683","title":{"rendered":"State-Sponsored Intimidation, Or When FARA Goes Too Far"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/orientalreview.org\/2017\/09\/13\/state-sponsored-intimidation-fara-goes-too-far\/\">State-Sponsored Intimidation, Or When FARA Goes Too Far<\/a><a style=\"font-size: 16px;\" href=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?ssl=1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-16802\" src=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?resize=760%2C450&amp;ssl=1\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?w=760&amp;ssl=1 760w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?resize=300%2C178&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?resize=93%2C55&amp;ssl=1 93w\" alt=\"\" width=\"760\" height=\"450\" data-attachment-id=\"16802\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/orientalreview.org\/2017\/09\/13\/state-sponsored-intimidation-fara-goes-too-far\/fara\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?fit=760%2C450&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"760,450\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"fara\" data-image-description=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?fit=300%2C178&amp;ssl=1\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/orientalreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/fara.jpg?fit=760%2C450&amp;ssl=1\" \/><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"post-area\">\n<div class=\"post-inner\">\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"pf-content\">\n<p><strong>The US government is blatantly violating the most basic tenets of its purportedly \u201csacred\u201d ideology of \u201chuman rights\u201d and \u201cfree speech\u201d by egregiously overstepping the bounds of FARA to engage in the same type of state-sponsored intimidation that it regularly accuses its geopolitical opponents of for far less. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/news\/sputnik-russian-news-agency-investigation-fbi-090024231.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yahoo<\/a> broke the story earlier on Monday that the FBI questioned former Sputnik employee Andrew Feinburg following his public complaints to the media about how the company is supposedly being run, and this reportedly came after another former employee, Joseph John Fionda, allegedly contacted the FBI on his own initiative to share \u201ca big packet\u201d of information accusing Sputnik of breaking the law. The legislation at the center of this scandal is the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Foreign Agents Registration Act<\/a>\u201d (FARA), a 1938 law originally passed to expose Nazi influence operations inside of the US. It\u2019s since been used for registering anyone who works as a \u201cforeign agent\u201d, which stereotypically refers to Congressional lobbyists hired by foreign governments but is nowadays being proposed by some US voices to apply to Sputnik and RT as well.<\/p>\n<p>The basis for this move is that both companies are publicly funded by the Russian government, and that this therefore supposedly makes them \u201cpropaganda\u201d because it\u2019s assumed by the American authorities that all of their employees lack \u201ceditorial independence\u201d from the Kremlin. As could have been expected,<strong> the same forces pushing for Sputnik and RT to register as \u201cforeign agents\u201d under FARA aren\u2019t interested in equally applying these expanded \u201cstandards\u201d to other publicly financed international media outlets such as Al Jazeera and the BBC.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>State-Sponsored Intimidation, Or When FARA Goes Too Far The US government is blatantly violating the most basic tenets of its purportedly \u201csacred\u201d ideology of \u201chuman rights\u201d and \u201cfree speech\u201d by egregiously overstepping the bounds of FARA to engage in the same type of state-sponsored intimidation that it regularly accuses its geopolitical opponents of for far [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[6108,16010,4624,16011,655,9950,16009],"class_list":["post-25683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-andrew-korybko","tag-fara","tag-intimidation","tag-oriental-review","tag-propaganda","tag-sputnik","tag-state-sponsored-propaganda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25684,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25683\/revisions\/25684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}