The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007is a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. Its stated purpose is to deal with "homegrown terrorism and violent radicalization" by establishing a national commission, establishing a center for study, and cooperating with other nations.
The bill was introduced to the House on April 19 2007, and passed on Oct 23, 2007. It was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959. The bill defines some terms including "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence," which have provoked controversy from some quarters. Although Section 899F of HR 1955 specifically prohibits "the violation of Civil Rights and Liberties in the enforcement of the bill," critics claim its enactment would pave the way for violations of Civil Rights and Liberties.
Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has said he believes the bill is "unconstitutional" and has referred to the bill as a "thought crime bill".
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), addressed the bill in he House on Dec. 5, 2007 saying: "This seems to be an unwise and dangerous solution in search of a real problem. Previous acts of ideologically motivated violence, though rare, have been resolved successfully using law enforcement techniques, existing laws against violence, and our court system," despite the fact that this bill does not "solve" anything and enacts no new laws of or pertaining to speech in the United States.
public | Social media companies, including TikTok, Snap, and Twitter, caused
people in France to riot and so the government should shut them down,
say French President Emmanuel Macron and the European Union’s top
censor, Thierry Breton.
Said Macron, “When things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them or cut [social networks] off.” The reason, Breton explained today,
is that “Social media didn’t do enough” to remove "content that is
hateful, that calls to revolt and to kill.” Warned Breton, "If they
don’t do it, they will be sanctioned immediately.”
The
comments made by Macron and Breton are shocking, and anybody who cares
about freedom of speech should denounce them as a clear and present
threat to the fundamental human right to freedom of expression as
enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the French
Constitution, and the European Constitution.
It’s
true that there are legal protections for removing "content that is
hateful, that calls to revolt and to kill.” Such immediate incitement to
violence is even illegal in the United States, which has much stronger
free speech protections than France and Europe.
But neither
Macron, Breton nor their defenders have presented any evidence showing
that hate speech or incitement to violence rather than outrage over a
police killing, combined with a large and restless immigrant population
that France has failed to integrate and assimilate, caused the riots.
And their calls for greater censorship come at the same moment that the Macron government has passed a new law allowing police to spy on people by secretly taking control of their phones and laptop computers
and activating the microphone, camera, and GPS. The government says a
judge will have to approve all spying, but it is reasonable to worry
about abuses of power. In 2013, military contractor Edward Snowden
revealed mass US government spying without a warrant.
What’s
more, the attack on privacy and the demand for censorship is worldwide.
The British parliament is expected to pass legislation in the next few
weeks that will allow the government to spy on private and encrypted
text messages. The Irish Senate is expected to pass legislation in
October that will allow the police to enter homes without a warrant and
search phones and laptops for evidence of hate speech. And Australia is on the cusp of passing a new law
that would require social media companies to remove any speech that
causes “harm” to “health” or “the environment,” which would allow
government censorship of criticisms of its climate and energy policies.
Why is the attack on free speech and privacy happening in so many nations simultaneously? And what can be done about it?
NC | So, who in the EU will get to define what actually constitutes mis- or disinformation?
Surely it will be the job of an independent regulator or a judicial
authority with at least clear procedural parameters and no or few
conflicts of interest. At least that is what one would hope.
But no.
The ultimate decider of what constitutes mis- or dis-information,
possibly not just in the EU but across multiple jurisdictions around the
world (more on that later), will be the European Commission. That’s
right, the EU’s power-hungry, conflict-riddled, Von der Leyen-led
executive branch. The same institution that is in the process of
dynamiting the EU’s economic future through its endless backfiring
sanctions on Russia and which is mired in Pfizergate, one of the biggest
corruption scandals of its 64-year existence. Now the Commission wants
to take mass censorship to levels not seen in Europe since at least the
dying days of the Cold War.
In this task the Commission will have, in its own words, “enforcement
powers similar to those it has under anti-trust proceedings,” adding
that “an EU-wide cooperation mechanism will be established between
national regulators and the Commission.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) broadly supports
many aspects of the DSA, including the protections it provides on user
rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted
advertising based on sensitive user information, such as sexual
orientation or ethnicity. “More broadly, the DSA increases the
transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must
place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the
ad and other details.” It also “reins in the powers of Big Tech” by
forcing them to “comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly
tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform.”
But even the EFF warns that the new law “provides a fast-track
procedure for law enforcement authorities to take on the role of
‘trusted flaggers’ and uncover data about anonymous speakers and remove
allegedly illegal content – which platforms become obligated to remove
quickly.” The EFF also raises concerns about the dangers posed by the
Commission’s starring role in all of this:
Issues with government involvement in content moderation
are pervasive and whilst trusted flaggers are not new, the DSA’s system
could have a significant negative impact on the rights of users, in
particular that of privacy and free speech.
And free speech and a free press are the foundation stones of any genuine liberal democracy, as notes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):
The First Amendment protects our freedom to speak,
assemble, and associate with others. These rights are essential to our
democratic system of governance. The Supreme Court has written that
freedom of expression is “the matrix, the indispensable condition of
nearly every other form of freedom.” Without it, other fundamental
rights, like the right to vote, would cease to exist. Since its
founding, the ACLU has advocated for broad protection of our First
Amendment rights in times of war and peace, to ensure that the
marketplace of ideas remains vigorous and unrestricted.
A Transatlantic “Wish List”
The DSA and the Biden Administration’s proposed RESTRICT Act (which Yves dissected back in April) were among the topics discussed during Russell Brand’s recent interview of Matt Taibbi. Both bills, said
Taibbi, are essentially a “wish list that has been passed around” by
the transatlantic elite “for some time,” including at a 2021 gathering
at the Aspen Institute:
The governments want absolute, full and complete access
to all data that these platforms provide. And then they want a couple of
other things that are really important. They want to have the authority
to come in and moderate or at least be part of the process of
moderation. And they also want people who are called trusted “flaggers” —
that’s how they’re described in the European law — to have access to
these platforms as well. What they mean by that are these outside
quasi-governmental agencies who tell these platforms what they can and
cannot print about things like vaccine safety.
In other words, the legal environment for free speech is set to
become even more hostile in Europe. And possibly not just Europe. As
Norman Lewis writes for the British online news website Spiked,
the DSA will not only force the regulation of content on the Internet,
but could also become a global standard, not just a European one:
tablet | My
fellow citizens, meet the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security
Agency—better known as CISA—a government acronym with the same word in
it twice in case you wondered about its mission. This agency was created
in the waning days of the Obama administration, supposedly to protect
our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses
and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into their
existence, CISA decided that their remit also should include protecting
our “cognitive infrastructure” from various threats.
“Cognitive
infrastructure” is the actual phrase used by current CISA head Jen
Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top
secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency. It refers to
the thoughts inside your head, which is precisely what the
government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like
Easterly, are attempting to control. Naturally, these thoughts need to
be protected from bad ideas, such as any ideas that the people at CISA
or their government partners do not like.
In
early 2017, citing the threat from foreign disinformation, the
Department of Homeland Security unilaterally declared federal control
over the country’s election infrastructure, which had previously been
administered at the local level. Not long after that, CISA, which is a
subagency of the DHS, established its own authority over the cognitive
infrastructure by becoming the central hub coordinating the government’s
information control activities. This pattern was repeated in several
other government agencies around the same time (there are currently a
dozen federal agencies named among the defendants in our suit).
So,
what exactly has the government been doing to protect our cognitive
infrastructure? Perhaps the best way to wrap your head around the actual
operations of the new American censorship leviathan is to consider the
vivid analogy offered by our brilliant attorney, John Sauer, in the
introduction of our brief for the injunction. This is worth quoting at
length:
Suppose
that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both
Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United
States burn books criticizing the President, and the President made
statements implying that the libraries would face ruinous legal
consequences if they did not comply, while senior White House officials
privately badgered the libraries for detailed lists and reports of such
books that they had burned and the libraries, after months of such
pressure, complied with those demands and burned the books.
Suppose
that, after four years of pressure from senior congressional staffers
in secret meetings threatening the libraries with adverse legislation if
they did not cooperate, the FBI started sending all libraries in the
United States detailed lists of the books the FBI wanted to burn,
requesting that the libraries report back to the FBI by identifying the
books that they burned, and the libraries complied by burning about half
of those books.
Suppose
that a federal national security agency teamed up with private research
institutions, backed by enormous resources and federal funding, to
establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program that uses
sophisticated techniques to review hundreds of millions of American
citizens’ electronic communications in real time, and works closely with
tech platforms to covertly censor millions of them.
The
first two hypotheticals are directly analogous to the facts of this
case. The third, meanwhile, is not a hypothetical at all; it is a
description of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.
The
censorship activities of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency,
which it terms “information warfare,” have turned the FBI, in the words
of whistleblower Steve Friend, into an “intelligence agency with law
enforcement powers.” But there is no “information warfare” exception to
the constitutional right of free speech. Which other federal agencies
are involved in censorship? Besides the ones you might suspect—the DOJ,
NIH, CDC, Surgeon General, and the State Department—our case has also
uncovered censorship activities by the Department of the Treasury (don’t
criticize the feds’ monetary policies), and yes, my friends, even the Census Bureau (don’t ask).
In
prior precedent-setting cases on censorship, the Supreme Court
clarified that the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution
exists not just for the person speaking but for the listener as well: We
all have the right to hear both sides of debated issues to make
informed judgments. Thus all Americans have been harmed by the
government’s censorship leviathan, not just those who happen to post
opinions or share information on social media.
The judge presiding over the case, Terry Dougherty, asked on Friday in court if anyone had read George Orwell’s 1984
and whether they remembered the Ministry of Truth. “It’s relevant
here,” he added. It is indeed time to slay the government’s Ministry of
Truth. I hope that our efforts in Missouri v. Biden prove to be a crucial first step in this project to restore our constitutional rights.
startribune | A federal judge in Louisiana on
Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with
social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling
that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives
about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.
The
order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a
major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits
of speech online.
It
was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites
like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down
right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government.
Democrats say the platforms have failed to adequately police
misinformation and hateful speech, leading to dangerous outcomes,
including violence.
In
the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the
Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government,
including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, could
not talk to social media companies for "the purpose of urging,
encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion,
suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech."
In
granting a preliminary injunction, Doughty said that the agencies could
not flag specific posts to the social media platforms or request reports
about their efforts to take down content. The ruling said that the
government could still notify the platforms about posts detailing
crimes, national security threats or foreign attempts to influence
elections.
"If
the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably
involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States'
history," the judge said. "The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the
merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence
the opposition."
Courts
are increasingly being forced to weigh in on such issues — with the
potential to upend decades of legal norms that have governed speech
online.
The
Republican attorneys general of Texas and Florida are defending
first-of-their-kind state laws that bar internet platforms from taking
down certain political content, and legal experts believe those cases
may eventually reach the Supreme Court. The high court this year
declined to limit a law that allows the platforms to escape legal
liability for content that users post to the sites.
The
ruling Tuesday, in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of
Louisiana and Missouri, is likely to be appealed by the Biden
administration, but its impact could force government officials,
including law enforcement agencies, to refrain from notifying the
platforms of troublesome content.
Government
officials have argued they do not have the authority to order posts or
entire accounts removed, but federal agencies and the tech giants have
long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material,
especially in cases involving child sexual abuse, human trafficking and
other criminal activity. That has also included regular meetings to
share information on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
The
White House said the Justice Department was reviewing the ruling and
evaluating its next steps."Our consistent view remains that social media
platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects
their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent
choices about the information they present," the White House said in a
statement.
Meta,
which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment. Twitter did not
have a comment, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Jeff
Landry, the Louisiana attorney general, said in a statement that the
judge's order was "historic." Missouri's attorney general, Andrew
Bailey, hailed the ruling as a "huge win in the fight to defend our most
fundamental freedoms." Both officials are Republican.
— Top Notch Journal (@topnotchjournal) July 2, 2023
theconservativetreehouse | Let me take you back to 2010 and 2011 when the U.S. State Department, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, CIA Director Leon Panetta and French President Nicholas Sarkozy wanted to support the Islamist Spring uprisings in Tunis, Libya, Egypt and Yemen.
What happened then is very much related to what we are seeing right now in Europe, specifically France; only this time we are seeing the inverse of the government interests regarding social media on display.
The bad dictators were targeted for removal following the now famous Barack Obama Cairo, Egypt speech. President Barack Obama triggered the removal of the Zookeepers and released the big cats to become apex predators; the downstream consequences eventually showed up with ISIS burning people in cages.
When the leaders of Tunis, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan and a
multitude of other unapproved dictatorships, reacted to the collective
effort of the CIA and U.S. state Dept by shutting down cell phone
communication, the CIA and DoS responded by enlisting Twitter and
Facebook as the messaging platforms for the rebels in each country.
Twitter became the main conduit through which the people on the
ground could organize against their regimes. This was the initial merge
of the U.S. government using social media to effect political change.
[Side Note: this is the atom splitting moment which eventually led to
the government’s ability to control, filter and ultimately censor U.S.
social media content.]
Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, served the interests of
western government by helping the people on the ground to organize
protests, violent uprisings, against the dictators in the Arab Spring.
As we eventually saw in Libya and Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt,
AQIM) and al-Qaeda (Libya, AQAP) were supported by the State Dept/CIA
during that effort.
The key takeaway is: the uprisings were supported by the western
governments, and the social media platforms served the interests of the
western government leadership.
We have the inverse issue for the interests of western government,
specifically France and broad parts of the EU as well as the United
States.
General uprisings, riots and assorted mayhem created by mostly
Islamic immigrants and the subsequent cultural clash, are against the
interests of France and the EU. The ability of the cultural insurgents
to organize on social media is now against the interests of western
government. How are they reacting? They are shutting down the utility of
the platforms and shutting down the internet.
The initial takeaway from this might be perceived as good. The
rioters are creating social unrest, looting, arson and crisis; they must
be stopped and controlled. It seems like the government action will be a
good thing.
However, as with the example of private corporations joining in
alignment with WEF government to target Russia, what do you think will
happen when a populist revolt of yellow vests, or anti-vaxxers, or
freedom rebels take to the streets? Precedents are being set.
You might cheer France using control over communication to target the
violent brown people now; but what happens when those same EU entities
decide to target the communication of a different type of uprising. This
is me, sending warning flares to those who might not care about this
‘beta-test’.
Oh, and don’t forget the Senate Intelligence Committee recent effort with the “Restrict Act“, total internet and domestic social media control pushed under the auspices of controlling TikTok data collection.
consentfactory | To: Ella G. Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety, Twitter, Inc. cc: Elon Musk
Dear Ms. Irwin,
This open letter is further to our brief correspondence on May 3,
2023 (on Twitter) regarding Twitter’s censorship and defamation of my
@consent_factory Twitter account with fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels for approximately two years.
First, thank you for taking action to cease and desist from further
censorship and defamation. From what I can tell, it appears that Twitter
is removing or has removed the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels
from the @consent_factory Twitter account’s Tweets (or at least going
back to late 2021). I trust that these fake “age-restricted adult
content” labels will be removed from all of the account’s
Tweets in due course, and I appreciate your prompt attention to this
matter. Please accept my apology for claiming that you had lied about
taking action on this. I admit, after two years of being censored and
defamed, and having my complaints ignored by Twitter, I have become
rather skeptical regarding your company’s behavior and statements. That
said, it is clear now that you were not lying, and that you have taken
action to have the fake, defamatory labels in question removed, and I
apologize for publicly claiming otherwise.
Assuming the process is eventually completed and all of the fake,
defamatory “adult content” labels that Twitter has been censoring the
@consent_factory Twitter account with are in fact removed, I would
appreciate substantive answers to the following questions:
(1) Why and exactly how did Twitter start censoring and
defaming my Consent Factory account with these fake, defamatory “adult
content” labels? When I asked you to explain that in our correspondence, you replied:
Clearly, the account did not “post multiple tweets
containing sensitive content (nazi imagery) that resulted in the
sensitive content label being applied,” because Twitter has now removed
the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels from those Tweets, which
contain the same “Nazi imagery” they originally contained. As I am sure
you have noted, the so-called “Nazi imagery” contained in those Tweets
was simply historical photos of the Nazi Germany era, which were used to
illustrate critical points I was making in opposition to totalitarianism,
and not at all any type of celebration or approval of totalitarianism
or fascism. Any rational adult, seeing those Tweets, could not possibly
mistake the anti-fascist/totalitarian intent behind them. Also, the fact
that the fake, defamatory “adult content” labels are being removed
gradually, in stages, rather than all at once, suggests that the
application of the fake labels (or “interstitials”)
in question was not the result of a blanket algorithm applied to the
account. Additionally, not every Tweet (or every Tweet containing an
image) by this account was censored with a fake “interstitial,” which
suggests that something other than a blanket algorithm was at work.
In any event, having been censored and defamed for two years by
Twitter, Inc., I think I am entitled to an actual explanation of how
this started, including documentation of any intra-company discussions
or “log” notes in connection with the decision to begin censoring and
defaming the account. Your substantive response to this request will
demonstrate that the “new” Twitter is, in fact, committed to
transparency, and free speech, and not just another element of the
“Censorship Industrial Complex,” as Michael Shellenberger and Matt
Taibbi dubbed it, before Mr. Musk cut off access to the “Twitter Files.”
(2) What, if any, other restrictions/visibility filtering
tactics have been applied to my @consent_factory Twitter account from
2020 to the present? Again, I would appreciate documentation of
any such “visibility filtering” or other “restrictions” and/or the
removal thereof. Having been censored and maliciously defamed by Twitter
for years, I believe I am entitled to know how my “visibility” is being
and/or has been “filtered.”
(3) What steps is Twitter, Inc. now taking to cease and
desist from the type of malicious defamation the company has been
engaging in to suppress political speech and damage the reputation and
income of writers, like me, and independent media outlets, like, for
example, OffGuardian? Twitter blocks links to all OffGuardian articles with a different fake, defamatory “interstitial” warning.
There is nothing “unsafe” about OffGuardian,
or any content published on the website that could possibly “lead to
real-world harm.” It is a small, independent news and commentary outlet.
Twitter, Inc. is using the fake “interstitial” warning above to
discourage users from visiting the site, and thus damaging OffGuardian’s
reputation and income. This is just one further example (i.e., in
addition to my case). Twitter’s continued use of fake, defamatory,
“interstitial” labels to suppress political views is relatively
widespread, as far as I can tell. Moreover, recent updates to Twitter’s Platform Use Guidelines
make it clear that Twitter intends to continue using these
“interstitials,” which is worrying, given the fact that the company has
been using them to deceive people, and to suppress political speech, and
to damage the reputations and incomes of small businesses and sole
proprietors.
justice | A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding
indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with
working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the
Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign
malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the
superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited,
funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal
agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian
propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular,
participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local
office within the United States.
This is an absolutely remarkable - and chilling - indictment. Several American black leftist groups and activists are being charged with felonies for posting memes and other political content against the war in Ukraine, protesting racial injustice: allegedly on behalf of Russia: https://t.co/SQ1K1VZG1v
Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a
criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia
Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent
of Russia in the United States.
“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First
Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide
Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said
Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s
National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose
and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in
service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits
are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”
“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S.
elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General
Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
“As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is
committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S.
political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”
“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian
government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere
with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit
U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt
Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should
be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain
vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains
committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately
disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”
United States v. Ionov, et al.
According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle
District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow,
was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of
Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and
funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry
out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were
allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers,
including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor
Sergeyevich Popov.
“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting
the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves
into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B.
Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at
the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their
commitment to ensure justice is done.”
Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges
that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially
influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely
funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate
for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the
superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this
effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov
referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov
and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would
extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and
subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the
FSB’s “main topic of the year.”
Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov
allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign
targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly
recruited members of political groups within the United States,
including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement
(collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a
political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment
as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign
and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the
following indicted defendants:
Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg,
Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder
of the APSP;
Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg,
Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a
component of the APSP;
Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida,
and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the
APSP; and
Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in
St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP
and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.
One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create
the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of
territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a
request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an
apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to
Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements
in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s
Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov
later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded
statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit
organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.
The billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed that he was
shocked to find out the real scale of the US government involvement and
access to Twitter communications when he purchased and took full control
of the social media giant last year.
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access
to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Fox
News’ Tucker Carlson, claiming he “was not aware of that” up until he eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October.
Musk confirmed that “everything” includes users’ supposedly private
direct messages, but the brief Sunday teaser of the upcoming interview
did not show whether Musk went on to call out any particular agencies or
their methods. It is also unclear what, if anything, has since changed
to limit the scope of the government’s access to people’s private
communications.
Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the
platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal
documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously
opaque censorship policies and cozy ties with federal law enforcement
and intelligence agencies, enlisting independent journalists to break
each document dump.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on the first batch of files back in
December, recently described the collusion between social media
platforms, non-governmental organizations and the US government to
suppress information they did not like as the “censorship-industrial
complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth
in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a
free press envisioned in the US Constitution.
racket |On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest
of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review
reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a
dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app
where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:
Dark
humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of
impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into
symbols of hatred, researchers say.
Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!
The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:
The New York Timessummarized
key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things
suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their
government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s
not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction
to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught
lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve
been spying on, etc.
You’ll read a lot in the coming
days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups,
which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act,
the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would
give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication
technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.
The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post
in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a
Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or
intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump
years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to
supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.
When
civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail
for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord
Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is
Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top
FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly
about using “strategic leaks”
as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the
ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.
Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.
racket |I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or a rectal.
I
accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on
the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re
reading this, things have gone another way.
I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.
The
Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same
day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to
share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure”
on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I
thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t
“have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This
was the TV equivalent of a shrug.
Nance jumped on
this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal.
“Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There
is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note
reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t
seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”
“Unequivocally”seemed
to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence
is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with
the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the
CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris
about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris
wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade
of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.
To
this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question,
“What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but
to MSNBC, not me.
That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic
of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what
reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to
saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in
which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician
or intelligence official told you it was.
We know how that worked
out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other
traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless
spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news
network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.
racket | Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia
story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.
If
the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a
word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to
re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to
fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law,
either. New language would have to be invented just to define the
wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go
unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to
talk about it.
Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll—
was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as
2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating
13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article
is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation
elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.
It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story
from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter
executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him
frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m
glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and
in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political
audiences.
Siegel threads together all the disparate
strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes
is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a
first great test case, the rise of a public-private
“counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance
of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the
development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of
things like elections, amid many other things.
He concludes
with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is
that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership,
might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step
in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just
announced it was “building a set of use cases”
to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as
Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just
barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a
one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human
conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI
technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”
More
unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart
people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel
recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times
really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time
to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually
keeping us free.”
Both the actors in the Twitter Files and
the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute
and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with
re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not
popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the
Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial
Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the
“rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out)
people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital
deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of
pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we
await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this
political gardening metaphor to the smart set.
foxnews |EXCLUSIVE: The Biden
administration has led "the largest speech censorship operation in
recent history" by working with social media companies to suppress and
censor information later acknowledged as truthful," former Missouri
attorney general Eric Schmitt will tell the House Weaponization
Committee Thursday.
Schmitt, now a Republican
senator from Missouri, is expected to testify alongside Louisiana
Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri deputy attorney general
for special litigation, D. John Sauer.
The three witnesses will discuss the findings of their federal government censorship lawsuit, Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al—which they filed in May 2022 and which they describe as "the most important free speech lawsuit of this generation."
The testimony comes after Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit
against the Biden administration, alleging that President Biden and
members of his team "colluded with social media giants Meta, Twitter,
and YouTube to censor free speech in the name of combating so-called
‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation.’"
The lawsuit alleges that
coordination led to the suppression and censorship of truthful
information "on a scale never before seen" using examples of the COVID
lab-leak theory, information about COVID vaccinations, Hunter Biden’s
laptop, and more.
The lawsuit is currently in discovery, and Thursday’s hearing is
expected to feature witness testimony that will detail evidence
collected to show the Biden administration has "coerced social media
companies to censor disfavored speech."
"Discovery obtained by
Missouri and Louisiana demonstrated that the Biden administration’s
coordination with social media companies and collusion with
non-governmental organizations to censor speech was far more pervasive
and destructive than ever known," Schmitt will testify, according to
prepared testimony obtained by Fox News Digital.
racket |The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become
the proxy for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016,
when the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination
first began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a
crucial moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”
This piece was a cri de coeur for
the educated set. I read it on the way to covering Trump’s clinching
victory in the Indiana primary, and though I disagreed with its premise,
I recognized right away that Andrew’s argument was brilliant and would
have legs. Sullivan described Plato’s paradoxical observation that
“tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy,”
explaining that as freedoms spread and deference to authority withered,
the state would become ungovernable:
The
very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly
intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention
the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of
women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A
father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a
son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before
or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is
frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light
of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich
mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The
foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
It
was already patently obvious to anyone covering politics in America
that respect for politicians and institutions was vanishing at warp
speed. I thought it was a consequence of official lies like WMD, failed
policies like the Iraq War or the financial crisis response, and the
increasingly insufferable fakery of presidential politics. People like author Martin Gurri pointed at a free Internet, which allowed the public to see these warts in more hideous technicolor than before.
Sullivan
saw many of the same things, but his idea about a possible solution was
to rouse to action the country’s elites, who “still matter” and
“provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.” Look,
Andrew’s English, a crime for which I think people may in some cases be
excused (even if I found myself reaching for something sharp when he
described Bernie Sanders as a “demagogue of the left”). Also, his essay
was subtle and had multiple layers, one of which was an exhortation to
those same elites to wake up and listen to the anger in the population.
Unfortunately,
post-election, each successive version of what was originally a careful
and subtle “Too Much Democracy” idea became more simplistic and
self-serving. By 2019 the shipwreck of the Weekly Standard, the Bulwark, was publishing “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,”
an article which insisted it wasn’t an argument for the vote to be
restricted, but “it is an argument for a political, social, and cultural
compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.” Soon we had
people like Joan Donovan of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center leading the
charge for “de-platforming,” not as a general principle of course, but
merely as a “short-term” solution. In its own way it was very Trumpian thinking: we just need to clamp down on speech until we can “figure out what is going on.”
Still, as far back as 2016, the RAND Corporation conducted a study showing the phrase most predictive of Trump support was “people like me don’t have any say.”
This was a problem of corporate and financial concentration invisible
to people of a certain class. As fewer and fewer people were needed to
run the giant banking or retail delivery or communications machines of
society, there were more and more going straight from college back to
their parents’ houses, where they spent their days fighting voice-mail
programs just to find out where to send their (inevitably unanswered)
job applications. This was going to inspire some angry tweets, and
frankly, allowing all of them was the least the system could do.
Instead
of facing the boiling-ever-hotter problem underneath, the managerial
types decided — in the short term only, of course — to mechanically
deamplify the discontent, papering things over with an expanding new
bureaucracy of “polarization mitigation,” what Michael calls the
Censorship-Industrial Complex. Instead of opening society’s doors and
giving people roles and a voice, those doors are being closed more
tightly, creating an endless cycle of anger and reaction.
Making a
furious public less visible doesn’t make it go away. Moreover, as we
saw at the hearing, clamping down on civil liberties makes obnoxious
leaders more conspicuous, not less. Democrats used to understand this,
but now they’re betting everything on the blinders they refuse to take
off, a plan everyone but them can see won’t end well.
zerohedge | As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the "weaponization" of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.
Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two "so-called journalists" as dangerous and a "threat" to former Twitter employees.
She claimed that Republicans brought "two of Elon Musk's ‘public scribes'" in "to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative - Elon Musk’s chosen narrative - that is now being parroted by the Republicans" for political gain.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:
“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”
“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.
“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”
Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:
“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.
“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system."
“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”
Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger's facts was to get personal...
The full hearing can be viewed below:
As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the 'Twitter Files' disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.
"Our findings are shocking," writes Shellenberger at his blog. "A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it."
Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on 'THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX' which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, 'contains some surprises.'
detroitnews | Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams
experienced possibly the biggest repercussion of his recent comments
about race when distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced Sunday it
would no longer work with the cartoonist.
Andrews
McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said in
a joint statement that the syndication company was “severing our
relationship" with Adams.
In the Feb. 22
episode of his YouTube show, Adams described people who are Black as
members of “a hate group” from which white people should “get away.”
Various media publishers across the U.S. denounced the comments as
racist, hateful and discriminatory while saying they would no longer
provide a platform for his work.
Andrews and
Sareyan said Andrews McMeel supports free speech, but the comments by
the cartoonist were not compatible with the core values of the company
based in Kansas City, Missouri.
“We are proud to promote and share many different
voices and perspectives. But we will never support any commentary rooted
in discrimination or hate,” they said in the statement posted on the
company website and Twitter.
The creator of the
long-running comic that pokes fun at office-place culture defended
himself on social media against those whom he said "hate me and are
canceling me.”
The backlash against Adams arose following
comments on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams
used the YouTube show to reference a Rasmussen Reports survey that had
asked whether people agreed with the statement “It's OK to be white."
Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren't sure.
The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was
popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion
forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.
Adams,
who is white, repeatedly referred to people who are Black as members of
a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer
“help Black Americans."
“Based on the current way things are going, the
best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from
Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.
In
another episode of his online show Saturday, Adams said he had been
making a point that “everyone should be treated as an individual”
without discrimination.
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