— 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.
wikipedia |Annie Jacobsen (born June 28, 1967) is an American
investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
She writes and produces television including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine
from 2009 until 2012. Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and
secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction
book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called "cauldron-stirring."[1]
She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author
who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing
popular conspiracies.[2]
Jacobsen's 2014 book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America[7]
was called "perhaps the most comprehensive, up-to-date narrative
available to the general public" in a review by Jay Watkins of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.[8]Operation Paperclip was included in a list of the best books of 2014 by The Boston Globe.[9] Leading space historian Michael J. Neufeld,
gave a negative review of the book: “Jacobsen concentrates on the
scandals, which inevitably leads to an imbalance in presentation. Little
is said about the substantive contributions of von Braun.”[10]
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research Agency,[11] was chosen as finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in history.[12]
The Pulitzer committee described the book as "A brilliantly researched
account of a small but powerful secret government agency whose military
research profoundly affects world affairs." The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Amazon Editors chose Pentagon's Brain as one of the best non-fiction books of 2015.
Her next book was published in March 2017:
Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.[13]
In May 2019, she released Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins. Apple audiobooks recorded SKV as one of the most popular audiobooks of 2019.[14]
J. R. Seeger, a retired CIA case officer who led the Agency's Team
Alpha, the first Americans behind enemy lines after 9/11, reviewed the
book, saying: "Jacobsen has a well-deserved reputation as a good writer
and an excellent researcher,” but he criticized her attention to detail,
and suggested that the book's focus was too general saying that
"neither of the topics are discussed in anything resembling the detail
required to understand the nuance of covert action".[15]
FAS | An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or
read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent
believe they are real. (1)
Former US Presidents Carter and Reagan claim to have seen a UFO.
UFOlogists--a neologism for UFO buffs--and private UFO organizations are
found throughout the United States. Many are convinced that the US
Government, and particularly CIA, are engaged in a massive conspiracy
and coverup of the issue. The idea that CIA has secretly concealed its
research into UFOs has been a major theme of UFO buffs since the modern
UFO phenomena emerged in the late 1940s. (2)
In late 1993, after being pressured by UFOlogists for the release of additional CIA information on UFOs, (3)
DCI R. James Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on
UFOs. Using CIA records compiled from that review, this study traces
CIA interest and involvement in the UFO controversy from the late 1940s
to 1990. It chronologically examines the Agency's efforts to solve the
mystery of UFOs, its programs that had an impact on UFO sightings, and
its attempts to conceal CIA involvement in the entire UFO issue. What
emerges from this examination is that, while Agency concern over UFOs
was substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only limited
and peripheral attention to the phenomena.
Background
The emergence in 1947 of the Cold War confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union also saw the first wave of UFO
sightings. The first report of a "flying saucer" over the United
States came on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and
reputable businessman, while looking for a downed plane sighted nine
disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington, traveling at an
estimated speed of over 1,000 mph. Arnold's report was followed by a
flood of additional sightings, including reports from military and
civilian pilots and air traffic controllers all over the United States. (4)
In 1948, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the Air Technical
Service Command, established Project SIGN (initially named Project
SAUCER) to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the
government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise
that UFOs might be real and of national security concern. (5)
The Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command
(AMC) at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton,
Ohio, assumed control of Project SIGN and began its work on 23 January
1948. Although at first fearful that the objects might be Soviet secret
weapons, the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily
explained and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost
all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria
and hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects.
Nevertheless, the report recommended continued military intelligence
control over the investigation of all sightings and did not rule out the
possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena. (6)
Amid mounting UFO sightings, the Air Force continued to collect
and evaluate UFO data in the late 1940s under a new project, GRUDGE,
which tried to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs via a public relations
campaign designed to persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing
unusual or extraordinary. UFO sightings were explained as balloons,
conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar
reflections, or even "large hailstones." GRUDGE officials found no
evidence in UFO sightings of advanced foreign weapons design or
development, and they concluded that UFOs did not threaten US security.
They recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very
existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in
UFOs and contributed to a "war hysteria" atmosphere. On 27 December
1949, the Air Force announced the project's termination. (7)
With increased Cold War tensions, the Korean war, and continued
UFO sightings, USAF Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. Charles P. Cabell
ordered a new UFO project in 1952. Project BLUE BOOK became the major
Air Force effort to study the UFO phenomenon throughout the 1950s and
1960s. (8)
The task of identifying and explaining UFOs continued to fall on the
Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson. With a small staff, the Air
Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) tried to persuade the public that
UFOs were not extraordinary. (9)
Projects SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUE BOOK set the tone for the official US
Government position regarding UFOs for the next 30 years.
Early CIA Concerns, 1947-52
CIA closely monitored the Air Force effort, aware of the
mounting number of sightings and increasingly concerned that UFOs might
pose a potential security threat. (10) Given the distribution of the sightings, CIA officials in 1952 questioned whether they might reflect "midsummer madness.'' (11)
Agency officials accepted the Air Force's conclusions about UFO
reports, although they concluded that "since there is a remote
possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to
investigate each sighting." (12)
A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952,
especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20
July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force
Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared. The
Air Force scrambled interceptor aircraft to investigate, but they found
nothing. The incidents, however, caused headlines across the country.
The White House wanted to know what was happening, and the Air Force
quickly offered the explanation that the radar blips might be the result
of "temperature inversions." Later, a Civil Aeronautics Administration
investigation confirmed that such radar blips were quite common and were
caused by temperature inversions. (13)
Although it had monitored UFO reports for at least three years,
CIA reacted to the new rash of sightings by forming a special study
group within the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office
of Current Intelligence (OCI) to review the situation. (14)
Edward Tauss, acting chief of OSI's Weapons and Equipment Division,
reported for the group that most UFO sightings could be easily
explained. Nevertheless, he recommended that the Agency continue
monitoring the problem, in coordination with ATIC. He also urged that
CIA conceal its interest from the media and the public, "in view of
their probable alarmist tendencies" to accept such interest as
confirming the existence of UFOs. (15)
Upon receiving the report, Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI)
Robert Amory, Jr. assigned responsibility for the UFO investigations to
OSI's Physics and Electronics Division, with A. Ray Gordon as the
officer in charge. (16)
Each branch in the division was to contribute to the investigation,
and Gordon was to coordinate closely with ATIC. Amory, who asked the
group to focus on the national security implications of UFOs, was
relaying DCI Walter Bedell Smith's concerns. (17)
Smith wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of
flying saucers was sufficiently objective and how much more money and
manpower would be necessary to determine the cause of the small
percentage of unexplained flying saucers. Smith believed "there was
only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the
security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken."
According to Smith, it was CIA's responsibility by statute to coordinate
the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also
wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in
connection with US psychological warfare efforts. (18)
Led by Gordon, the CIA Study Group met with Air Force officials
at Wright-Patterson and reviewed their data and findings. The Air Force
claimed that 90 percent of the reported sightings were easily accounted
for. The other 10 percent were characterized as "a number of
incredible reports from credible observers." The Air Force rejected the
theories that the sightings involved US or Soviet secret weapons
development or that they involved "men from Mars"; there was no evidence
to support these concepts. The Air Force briefers sought to explain
these UFO reports as the misinterpretation of known objects or little
understood natural phenomena. (19) Air Force and CIA officials agreed that outside knowledge of Agency interest in UFOs would make the problem more serious. (20) This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and coverup.
The CIA Study Group also searched the Soviet press for UFO
reports, but found none, causing the group to conclude that the absence
of reports had to have been the result of deliberate Soviet Government
policy. The group also envisioned the USSR's possible use of UFOs as a
psychological warfare tool. In addition, they worried that, if the US
air warning system should be deliberately overloaded by UFO sightings,
the Soviets might gain a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack. (21)
Because of the tense Cold War situation and increased Soviet
capabilities, the CIA Study Group saw serious national security concerns
in the flying saucer situation. The group believed that the Soviets
could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United
States. The group also believed that the Soviets might use UFO
sightings to overload the US air warning system so that it could not
distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs. H. Marshall Chadwell,
Assistant Director of OSI, added that he considered the problem of such
importance "that it should be brought to the attention of the National
Security Council, in order that a communitywide coordinated effort
towards it solution may be initiated." (22)
Chadwell briefed DCI Smith on the subject of UFOs in December
1952. He urged action because he was convinced that "something was
going on that must have immediate attention" and that "sightings of
unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in
the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that
they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial
vehicles." He drafted a memorandum from the DCI to the National
Security Council (NSC) and a proposed NSC Directive establishing the
investigation of UFOs as a priority project throughout the intelligence
and the defense research and development community. (23) Chadwell also urged Smith to establish an external research project of top-level scientists to study the problem of UFOs. (24)
After this briefing, Smith directed DDI Amory to prepare a NSC
Intelligence Directive (NSCID) for submission to the NSC on the need to
continue the investigation of UFOs and to coordinate such investigations
with the Air Force. (25)
gilbertdoctorow | The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of
Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described
variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely
outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and
demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
👴🇺🇸🇺🇦🇷🇺"The Russians have suffered over 100 000 cssualties in Bakhmut...I'ts hard to make up. It's hard to make up" - Joe Biden
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington
suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of
their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were
decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The
fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed
Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely
admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased
supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the
Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously
with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the
arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said
that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning
down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and
position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which
they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile
line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the
way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to
justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine
stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted
counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian
fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily
reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square
kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then
80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery
bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings
that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and
intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything
in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against
Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in
recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times
was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians
put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might
be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that
the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal
of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the
Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed
no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner
Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed
total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to
the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of
congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the
broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for
Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian
“disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what
to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the
surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian
fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their
Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources,
has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical
condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial
command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If
nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military
intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently
redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from
his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting
of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7
gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state
and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about
when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to
Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a
wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev
and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks
less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the
command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky
store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine
after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the
Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal
hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western
arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much
longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high
flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to
hell.
The photo they ran with–depicting Vitaly Klitchko inspecting the downed wreckage of a hypersonic missile–is quite misleading. Firstly, its from earlier in the month, not the recent attack on the Patriot missile battery. Secondly, that's not Kinzhal wreckage… the Kinzhal is
much larger and has different nose cone angles.
Ukraine presented "proof" that they shot down a Kinzhal, hoping perhaps that people will fail a basic shape recognition test. pic.twitter.com/CHRCFJ3jJN
And while the article invites, indeed sets up the
inference that the Russians have rounded these guys up because the
missiles were shot down (even though they weren’t), buried in the
article is a little problem with timing:
NBCNews | The three scientists — Anatoly Maslov, Alexander Shiplyuk
and Valery Zvegintsev — were employees of the Khristianovich Institute
of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in the Siberian city of
Novosibirsk. They were all detained on suspicion of high treason over
the past year, according to the letter published on the institute’s website.
The
letter professes the men’s innocence and praises their academic
achievements, adding that all three chose to stay in Russia rather than
accept highly paid and prestigious work abroad.
“We know
each of them as a patriot and a decent person who is not capable of
doing what the investigating authorities suspect them of,” it said.
It
is rare and risky in modern Russia to speak out in defense of people
charged with treason, especially after a bill was adopted last month
increasing the maximum sentence for the crime to life in jail.
The Russian state media agency Tass reported on the arrests of Maslov and Shiplyuk last summer and on Zvegintsev’s this week. It said Zvegintsev was detained about three weeks ago and is under house arrest. NBC News could not verify those details.
Shiplyuk was in charge
of the laboratory of hypersonic technologies at the institute, which
has “unique hypersonic aerodynamic installations designed to study the
fundamental and applied problems of hypersonic flight,” according to his
bio on the website. Maslov is a renowned expert in the field of
aerogasdynamics, it said.
The institute released an open letter
in support of Maslov after he was arrested in June for what it said was
“high treason,” saying his colleagues were “shocked” by his detention.
It was also raising money on behalf of the families of Maslov and
Shiplyuk to cover their legal expenses.
Tass reported
this week that the materials in Maslov’s case are classified and have
been handed over to a judge in a St. Petersburg court. The agency said
Maslov’s case was investigated by the FSB, Russia’s secret service.
While
the details of their cases have not been made public, the open letter
by their colleagues said the three men could have been arrested for
simply doing their jobs, including making presentations at global
conferences and taking part in international scientific projects. Their
work was also repeatedly checked by the institute’s expert commission to
ensure it did not include “restricted information,” the letter said.
“In
this situation, we are not only afraid for the fate of our colleagues.
We just do not understand how to continue to do our job,” it added,
raising concerns about “a rapid decline in the level of research” if
employees are too afraid to do their work.
politico | A deep secret,
like a glass of water, can be easily controlled and contained. But when
you build vast structures to hold them — a national security apparatus
in the case of secrets and canyon-spanning dams when it comes to water —
the pressures can exceed thousands of pounds per square inch. Unless
adequately monitored and maintained, secrets and water can breach their
restraints and flood everything downhill for miles.
The Pentagon just suffered such a dramatic breach as upward of 100 documents leaked. These files contained a grab-bag of national security secrets
including about the conduct of the war in Ukraine; U.S. success in
penetrating the Russian war machine; insights on the clandestine
maneuverings of Israel and South Korea; hints about a previously unknown
satellite surveillance technology; the attempted shoot-down of a
British spy plane by the Russians; a pending arms deal between Egypt and
Russia and one between Turkish contacts and the Wagner group; a Russian
effort to hack Canadian gas fields; and intelligence sources and
methods, all of which flowed onto online sites, drenching the Pentagon
in embarrassment and endangering secret missions around the world.
As
national security disasters go, the Pentagon leaks were complete. But
as great a scandal as the secrets deluge might be, the greater scandal
is how lax the Pentagon appears to be with such monumentally
confidential information that it could be purloined and posted on
freeform internet sites 4Chan and Discord. Squawking from Congress has ensued, of course, and the Pentagon has muttered about how “serious” the damage is. There is talk that some of the documents have been altered to exaggerate the number of Russian dead.
But the government is mostly ostriching the calamity right now.
President Joe Biden has been silent on the issue. And on Monday, White
House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby,
counseled the press to look away. Declining to confirm the provenance
of the documents, Kirby said, “It has no business — if you don’t mind me
saying — on the front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not
intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”
Yes,
yes! If the press and the public will only take a deep breath and
ignore the rising floodwaters, the Russians and the Turks and the
Israelis will ignore the tidal wave, too, and dryness will be restored
to the land. Good work, Kirby!
The Pentagon — and Kirby, who previously worked as a military and diplomatic affairs analyst for CNN
— have enough egg on their faces to start an omelet factory. They don’t
know how these secrets escaped their cage, they don’t know who
engineered the breakout, they don’t know if additional secrets were
snagged. They seem to know nothing and to be engaged in the magical
thinking that if we turn away the problem will disappear.
According to press reports, the stash of classified documents
appears to have been printed and photographed before being posted
online and were likely printed from a secure printer by an authorized
user. One unnamed U.S. official told the New York Times that hundreds, if not thousands,
of military and U.S. officials have security clearances that would
permit them access to the documents. The Pentagon is going to need a
wide dragnet if they hope to catch the leaker.
Guardian | A damaging batch of documents leaked from the Pentagon
appears to have been initially shared on the video game chat platform
Discord in an effort to win an argument about the war in Ukraine,
according to open-source intelligence analysts.
The
bizarre provenance of the leak may seem unusual but it is far from the
first time that a dispute between gamers has sparked an intelligence
breach, with the overlapping communities causing problems for military
and gaming platforms alike.
The
existence of the leaked cache was exposed as documents showing
estimated casualties in the Bakhmut theatre of battle began circulating
on public social networks last week.
Two
versions of those documents, one of which had been crudely digitally
altered to understate Russian casualties and overstate Ukrainian ones,
were passed around among observers of the war. One, with the correct
figures, stemmed from a leak to 4chan, the chaotic image board best known for birthing the “alt right” movement.
At the same time, a second set of documents, including the edited image, were being passed around pro-Russian Telegram channels.
Neither
was the original source, however. Before they emerged on to the public
internet, the documents had been shared on closed chatrooms hosted by
Discord, a gamer-focused chat app. In one server, called “Minecraft
Earth Map”, 10 of the documents were posted as early as 4 March, a month
before they appeared on 4chan.
“After a brief
spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war
in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied: ‘Here, have some leaked
documents’ – attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore
the ‘top secret’ markings,” said Aric Toler, an analyst at the investigative research group§ Bellingcat.
That
user had, in turn, found them on another Discord server, run by and for
fans of the Filipino YouTuber WowMao, where 30 documents had been
posted three days earlier, with “dozens” of other unverified documents
about Ukraine.
However, even that did not appear to be the original source: a third
Discord server, named “Thug Shaker Central”, among other titles, may
have been where the documents were originally posted as early as
mid-January.
“Posts and channel listings show
that the server’s users were interested in video games, music, Orthodox
Christianity, and fandom for the popular YouTuber ‘Oxide’,” Toler said,
referencing the military-themed YouTube channel. “This server was not
especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly
conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. Racial
slurs and racist memes were shared widely.”
Intelligence agencies have been aware of the need
to monitor gaming communities for some time. In 2013, the cache of
documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the
agency was actively monitoring Xbox Live, the voice chat platform for
Microsoft’s console, and had even deployed real-life agents into the virtual world of Azeroth, the setting of the World of Warcraft series.
One
document, written in 2008 and titled Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games
& Virtual Environments, warned that it was risky to leave gaming
communities under-monitored, describing them as a “target-rich
communications network”. The notes warned that so many different
agencies were conducting operations inside gaming services that a
“deconfliction” group was needed to prevent them spying on each other by
accident.
brownstone | On a video podcast the other day, I made
reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the
recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now
on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics.
Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs
those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business
model.
I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that
talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues?
Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and
throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being
trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing.
This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today
traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including
censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the
corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of
courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis.
And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is
too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being
canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in
today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t
want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being
memoryholed in ways of which they all approve.
For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not
to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery.
This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way
from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just
remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political
parties and third parties.
Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were
padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played
along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil
liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns,
mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission.
So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just
want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position,
having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many
generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it.
Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target
as a result.
racket | Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked
on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I
use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.
.@elonmusk, you know that thing where the left eats its own? We mustn’t let that happen to the emerging western-values/free-speech coalition. Many of us who have backed your Twitter play and taken substantial heat for it are thrown by this move. The public square isn’t a monopoly https://t.co/qe1Gn6P6H6
It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes
feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was
supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my
articles on Twitter instead of Substack.
Not much suspense
there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the
management of this company. Beginning early next week I’ll be using the
new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of
Twitter, a decision that apparently will come with a price as far as any
future Twitter Files reports are concerned. It was absolutely worth it
and I’ll always be grateful to those who gave me the chance to work on
that story, but man is this a crazy planet.
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.
WaPo | The Kremlin’s disinformation
casts the United States — and Ukraine — as villains for creating germ
warfare laboratories, giving Mr. Putin another pretext for a war that
lacks all justification. The disinformation undermines the biological
weapons treaty, showing that Mr. Putin has little regard for maintaining
the integrity of this international agreement. The disinformation
attempts to divert attention from Russia’s barbaric onslaught against
civilians in Ukraine. In 2018, the Kremlin may have been seeking to
shift attention from the attempted assassination of former double agent
Sergei Skripal in Britain, or from the Robert S. Mueller III
investigation that year of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential
campaign.
The biological laboratories are just one example of Russia’s wider disinformation campaigns.
Data shared by Facebook shows Russians “built manipulative Black Lives
Matter and Blue Lives Matter pages, created pro-Muslim and pro-Christian
groups, and let them expand via growth from real users,” says author Samuel Woolley in “The Reality Game.”
He adds, “The goal was to divide and conquer as much as it was to dupe
and convince.” During the pandemic, Russia similarly attempted to aggravate existing tensions
over public health measures in the United States and Europe. It has
also spread lies about the use of chemical weapons, undermining the
treaty that prohibits them and the organization that enforces it. In the
Ukraine war, Russia has fired off broadsides of disinformation, such as
claiming
the victims of the Mariupol massacre were “crisis actors.” Russia used
disinformation to mask its responsibility for the shoot-down of the
Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in 2014.
The
disinformation over Ukraine, repeated widely in the Russian media,
plays well with social groups that support Putin: the poor, those
living in rural areas and small towns, and those being asked to send
young men to the front. Mr. Putin so tightly controls the news media
that it is difficult for alternative news and messages to break through.
Disinformation
is a venom. It does not need to flip everyone’s, or even most people’s,
views. Its methods are to creep into the lifeblood, create uncertainty,
enhance established fears and sow confusion.
The best way to strike back is with the facts, and fast. Thomas Kent, the former president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, has pointed out
that the first hours are critical in such an asymmetrical conflict:
Spreaders of disinformation push out lies without worrying about their
integrity, while governments and the news media try to verify
everything, and take more time to do so. Mr. Kent suggests speeding the
release of information that is highly likely to be true, rather than
waiting. For example, it took 13 days for the British government to
reach a formal conclusion that Russia was behind the poisoning of Mr.
Skripal, but within 48 hours of the attack, then-Foreign Secretary Boris
Johnson told Parliament that it appeared to be Russia, which helped tip
the balance in the press and public opinion.
In
Ukraine, when Russia was on the threshold of invasion, government and
civil society organizations rapidly coordinated an informal “early
warning system”to detect and identify Russia’s false claims and
narratives. It was successful when the war began, especially with use of
the Telegram app. In a short time, Telegram use leapt from 12 percent
adoption to 65 percent, according to those involved in the effort
Also
in Ukraine, more than 20 organizations, along with the National
Democratic Institute in Washington, had created a disinformation
debunking hub in 2019 that has played a key role in the battle against the onslaught of lies. A recent report
from the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National
Endowment for Democracy identified three major efforts that paid off for
Ukraine in the fight against Russian disinformation as war began. One
was “deep preparation” (since Russia was recycling old claims from 2014,
they were ready); active and rapid cooperation of civil society groups;
and use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine
learning, to help sift through the torrents of Russian disinformation
and rapidly spot malign narratives.
Governments
can’t do this on their own. Free societies have an advantage that
autocrats don’t: authentic civil society that can be agile and
innovative. In the run-up to the Ukraine war, all across Central and
Eastern Europe, civil society groups were sharpening techniques for spotting and countering Russian disinformation.
Plain old media literacy among readers and viewers — knowing how to discriminate among sources, for example — is also essential.
Open societies are vulnerable because
they are open. The asymmetries in favor of malign use of information
are sizable. Democracies must find a way to adapt. The dark actors morph
constantly, so the response needs to be systematic and resilient.
reuters | The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack
on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the
presidential election result, according to four current and former law
enforcement officials.
Though
federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the
FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated
by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.
Kash Patel calls on Tucker Carlson to release footage of undercover feds:
"Ray Epps was on FBI's most wanted list one day, and the next day he was off. There are only two ways that happens: you die, or you are an informant. Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI counterintelligence… https://t.co/RALaXMKxX3pic.twitter.com/8DJXX5JN1z
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
"Ninety
to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former
senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation.
"Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were
more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone
and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take
hostages."
Stone,
a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster",
and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are
both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in
Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.
FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers
of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break
into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had
serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.
Prosecutors
have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging
that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.
They
alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to
stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the
weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan
to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.
But
so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious,
politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially
discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.
The
FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation
that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by
whom.
Senior
lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's
investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional
source said.
The
chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives
met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.
Slate | Carlson also made a big show of his “exclusive” interview with Tarik Johnson, a former Capitol officer who has actually been interviewed before by NPR.
The House’s select committee on Jan. 6 did a fine job of connecting
larger dots, drawing a straight line from the Stop the Steal rhetoric
through to the insurrection. But though it interviewed Capitol police
officers, it skipped an interview with Johnson, who was pictured that
day wearing a MAGA hat. “The frontline officers and supervisors were not
prepared at all,” Johnson said on the air. He told Carlson he asked
leadership for direction after the Capitol was breached. “I got no
response,” he said. (He said that he used the MAGA hat to avoid being
assaulted by the crowds of rioters himself; the Capitol police have
denied no one responded to Johnson.) Johnson offered seemingly sincere
answers to Carlson’s leading and partisan questions, and gave Carlson’s
audience a fair representation of the riot: “They focused on Donald
Trump, not the failures of the Capitol police,” he said of the
committee. “Some people there had planned on being violent. Some people
may have turned violent after what they were going through. I think
people wanted to support their president. Some of those people just
wanted to support him, and some of those people didn’t commit violence,
and some of those people didn’t plan on it.”
Kunstler | Could it be that the educated and
creatives of the coastal cities — the thinking class, the politically
active on the Left — had become so callous and arrogant as to dismiss
the suffering “little people” they once worked to protect and defend —
or had that also been an act? One thing for sure: the Democratic Party
lost this group as core constituents and they had to search elsewhere
for a voter base.
Another thing had changed along the
way: the Democratic Party became dominated by activist women, who
exhibited two outstanding behavioral tendencies: they tended to make
decisions on the basis of emotion… their feelings about this-and-that;
and they were much more ruthless in political battle than men — their
emotions eclipsed age-old principles, such as the idea of fair play. In short, they resorted almost automatically to dirty fighting.
That is probably at the heart of what
is most confounding and vexing about the great political division in
America these days. We are under a vile spell of pervasive dirty
fighting. Dirty fighters have no respect for reality or for principle;
they do whatever they can do to win the fight. Bad faith is the order of
the day. Hence, the battle over how elections will be conducted and who
gets to vote. You can read about it in Monday’s (Dec 26th) New York Times, an above-the-fold story titled: Democrats, Feeling New Strength, Plan to Go on Offense on Voting Rights. (As long as it stays up.) The story says:
Now it is Democrats, who retained all
but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state
legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense
in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include
creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers
to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released
from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.”
Note the last three words. The Times
boldly announces that opinion about elections should now be subject to
criminal prosecution if it deviates from whatever the official story is —
as determined by whom? Well, that would be a juridical apparatus
controlled by the Democratic Party. Who else might it be? The Times
doesn’t venture to say. You can also see that the Party doesn’t believe
in any principle that states who or why somebody should be qualified to
vote. Sign up people who manage to get a driver’s license, whether they
are citizens or not. Sign up the convicted criminals and the children.
Dirty fighting = dirty elections.
This is the direction our country has
been going in. I can offer only one note of consolation about what looks
like a pretty demoralizing predicament: what you’re seeing is the end
product of the late-stage in the life of a society. Obviously, it is
ending badly. The catch is we are entering a new era of American life,
an era of deep economic disorder, especially, that will go very hard on
the nation, that will rearrange many of the social categories we now
take for granted, that will compel people of all classes to pay
attention to reality, to what actually works and who actually knows how
to work what works. In that disposition of things, dirty fighting will
be recognized for what it is.
Perhaps the biggest part of that
unspooling event will be the bankruptcy and the failure of the
government in Washington, its consequent loss of legitimacy, and the end
of its ability to control and harass the people who live under it.
Think I’m kidding? Stand by now and wait for it.
greenwald |These moves by the U.S. Security State to commandeer censorship
decisions on TikTok, accompanied by the hovering threat to ban TikTok
entirely from the U.S., appear to be having the desired effect already.
When we launched our new live nightly show on Rumble, System Update, our social media manager created new social accounts for the program on major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, etc. Each day, she posts identical excerpts from the prior night's shows on each social media account.
For Monday night's show,
I devoted my opening monologue to documenting how reporting by
mainstream Western media outlets on Ukraine and President Zelensky
completely reversed itself as soon as Russia invaded in February. When
one reviews the trajectory of how these media outlets radically reversed
everything they had been saying about Ukraine and Zelensky, one can see
the Orwellian newspeak — we have always been at war with Eastasia — happening in real time.
For years, for instance, mainstream news outlets in the West repeatedly warned that the Ukrainian military was dominated by a neo-Nazi group called the Azov Battalion, that the Kiev-based government was becoming increasingly repressive and anti-democratic
(including ordering three opposition media outlets closed in 2021), and
that Zelensky himself was not only supported by a single Ukrainian
oligarch but he himself had massive off-shore accounts of hidden wealth as revealed by the Pandora Papers. And the U.S. State Department itself, in 2021, had documented a long list of severe human rights abuses carried out either with the acquiescence or even active participation of the Zelensky-led central government.
One of the video excerpts from our program that was posted to all social media sites, including TikTok, was this indisputably true and rather benign review of how media outlets, including The Guardian,
had previously depicted Zelensky as surrounded by corruption and hidden
wealth. To be sure, the excerpt was critical of Zelensky, but there is
absolutely nothing even factually contestable, let alone untrue, given
that the whole point of the clip is to show how the media had spoken of
Ukraine and Zelensky prior to the invasion as opposed to the
fundamentally different tone that now drives their coverage:
Shortly after posting this video, we were notified by TikTok that the
video was removed by the platform. The cited ground was “integrity and
authenticity,” namely that the video, for unspecified reasons, had
“undermine[d] the integrity of [their] platform or the authenticity of
[their users].” The warning added that TikTok "removes content and
accounts that…involve misleading information that causes significant
harm.” In a separate communication, TikTok notified our program that our
“account is at high risk of being restricted based on [our] violation
history” (the sole violation we were ever advised of was this specific
video). As a result, TikTok warned, “the next violation could result in
being prevented from accessing some feature.” A more ambiguous warning
could scarcely be imagined.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
