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.
2) The “TicTok ban” legislation
(SB686), which is a fraudulent auspice for total internet control by the
intelligence community, comes from within bipartisan legislation
spearheaded by the aligned interests of Senator Warner, the SSCI and
DHS.
3) None of this is accidental, and
the legislative branch is walking into the creation of an online control
mechanism that has nothing whatsoever to do with banning TikTok.
4) Preceding the Restrict Act, on
March 2, 2023, the people in control of the Joe Biden administration
officially announced that government control of internet content was now
officially a part of the national security apparatus.
5) If you have followed the history
of how the Fourth Branch of Government has been created, you will
immediately recognize the intent of this new framework.
6) The “National Cybersecurity
Strategy” aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S.
surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied
to “cybersecurity” and communication vectors.
7) This policy is both a
surveillance system and an information filtration prism where the
government will decide what is information, disinformation,
misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it.
8) Now put the March 2nd
announcement, the executive branch fiat, together with Senate Bill 686
“The Restrict Act” also known as the bipartisan bill to empower the
executive branch to shut down TikTok.
9) If you read SB 686 what you
discover is that congress is giving the Comm Dept & Office of
Director of National Intelligence the power to shut down internet
content they view as against their interests. The definitions of
interests? Outlined here👇:
amgreatness | Rep. Adam Schiff tucked an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act
that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse
Comitatus Act from being used in investigations. Why?
But if the military engaged in any
civilian law enforcement activity, including surveillance or
intelligence collection, before or during January 6, it would represent
an egregious violation of the military’s code of conduct and federal
law. Under the Posse Comitatus Act,
military personnel cannot be used as local cops or investigators:
“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized
by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the
Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a
posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under
this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” (Certain
exclusions, such as the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act
and any use of the National Guard, apply.)
The law is both vague and specific at
the same time—which brings us to Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Irrefutably the least trustworthy member of Congress, Schiff tucked an amendment
into the massive National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit
any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from
being used in a number of proceedings, including criminal trials and
congressional investigations.
The amendment’s timing, like everything else related to the infamous Russian collusion huckster, evidence forger, and nude photo seeker
(to name a few of Schiff’s special talents), is highly suspect. Why
would Schiff need to outlaw evidence collected unlawfully? Why is Schiff
relying on this relatively arcane statute passed during Reconstruction
that is rarely, if ever, enforced?
“No one has ever been convicted of violating PCA to my knowledge,” Dr. Jeffrey Addicott, a 20-year member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s College, told American Greatness last week.
What is Adam Schiff, on behalf of the
Biden regime and Trump foes in the U.S. military, including Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, trying to hide?
It is not a coincidence that Schiff
introduced the amendment just a few months before a predicted Republican
landslide in November, which will give control of Congress back to the
GOP. House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin
McCarthy is planning to conduct multiple investigations into the Biden
regime next year including of the deadly and distrasrous withdrawal from
Afghanistan; the Daily Caller reported
this week that Republican lawmakers are “flooding the Biden
administration with ‘hundreds of preservation notices’ asking that
relevant documents be preserved.”
But one can easily see how Schiff’s
amendment could be used as legislative cover to prevent production of
any materials from Biden’s Department of Defense. After all, according
to a 2018 congressional analysis
of Posse Comitatus, “compliance [of the act] is ordinarily the result
of military self-restraint.” So, too, is enforcement: “The act is a
criminal statute under which there has been but a handful of known
prosecutions,” the same report explained.
theconservativetreehouse | The FISA court identified and quantified
tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the
FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons
with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw
results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown
number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and
surveillance operation. When the DOJ use of the IRS for political
information on their opposition became problematic, the Obama
administration needed another tool. It was in 2012 when they switched
to using the FBI databases for targeted search queries.
This information from Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz had the potential to
be extremely explosive. However, the absence of any follow-up
reporting, or even debunking from the traditional guardians of the DC
swamp is weird. What’s going on?
I wrote about these suspicions in depth throughout 2017, 2018 and eventually summarized in 2019:
theconservativetreehouse |I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to
control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an
entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and
why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the
current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates
it.
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of
government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the
Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence
Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about
three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the
modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a
unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech
industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that
functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more
important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt
system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little known,
unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every
facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were
elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not
know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I
have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff
for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious
people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen
outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it,
with examples, in full detail with sunlight.
wikipedia | The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda; RMVP), also known simply as the Ministry of Propaganda (Propagandaministerium), was responsible for controlling the content of the press, literature, visual arts, film, theater, music and radio in Nazi Germany.
The ministry was created as the central institution of Nazi
propaganda shortly after the party's national seizure of power in
January 1933. In the Hitler cabinet it was headed by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who exercised control over all German mass media and creative artists through his ministry and the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), which was established in the fall of 1933.
Shortly after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, Adolf Hitler
presented his cabinet with a draft resolution to establish the
ministry. Despite the skepticism of some non-National Socialist
ministers, Hitler pushed the resolution through.[1] On 13 March 1933 Reich PresidentPaul von Hindenburg issued a decree ordering the establishment of a Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.[2]
It is important to note that at the time the German word ‘Propaganda’
was value neutral. In today's terms, the ministry could be understood to
have had a name that meant roughly ‘ministry for culture, media and
public relations’.[3]
The ministry moved into the 18th-century Ordenspalais building across from the Reich Chancellery in Berlin,[4] then used by the United Press Department of the Reich Government (Vereinigten Presseabteilung der Reichsregierung). It had been responsible for coordinating the Weimar Republic’s
official press releases but by then had been incorporated into the Nazi
state. On 25 March 1933 Goebbels explained the future function of the
Ministry of Propaganda to broadcasting company directors: "The Ministry
has the task of carrying out an intellectual mobilization in Germany. In
the field of the spirit it is thus the same as the Ministry of Defense
in the field of security. [...] Spiritual mobilization [is] just as
necessary, perhaps even more necessary, than making the people
materially able to defend themselves."[5]
The ministry was tailored for Joseph Goebbels, who had been the Reich propaganda leader of the Nazi Party
since April 1930. By a decree of 30 June 1933, numerous functions of
other ministries were transferred under the responsibility of the new
ministry. The role of the new ministry was to centralise Nazi control of
all aspects of German cultural, mass media and intellectual life for
the country.[4][6]
WSJ | The
Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of
searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S.
intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.
An
annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4
million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the
National Security Agency.
Senior
Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is
likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign
data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many
Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though
officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.
The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.
The
disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence
agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s
grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence
gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known
as Section 702, is due to expire next year.
While
the ODNI report doesn’t suggest systemic problems with the searches,
judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with
privacy rules. Officials said the FBI’s searches were vital to its
mission to protect the U.S. from national-security threats. The
frequency of other forms of national-security surveillance detailed in
the annual report generally fell year over year, in some cases
continuing a multiyear trend.
The
3.4 million figure “is certainly a large number,” a senior FBI official
said in a press briefing Friday on the report. “I am not going to
pretend that it isn’t.”
More
than half of the reported searches—nearly two million—were related to
an investigation into a national-security threat involving attempts by
alleged Russian hackers to break into critical infrastructure in the
U.S. Those searches included efforts to identify and protect potential
victims of the alleged Russian campaign, senior U.S. officials said.
Officials
declined to give more details on the alleged Russian threat, including
whether it was linked to the Russian government or a criminal hacking
group. Russia has historically denied accusations of hacking the U.S. or other nations.
scheerpost | Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring
social media under the wing of the national security state. This was
foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in
2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology
and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the
state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar
contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with
intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was
chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created
to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons,
further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda,
has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From
being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO,
he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S.
Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions
of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube
executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018,
Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic
Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions
of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information,
and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is
NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last
year, Facebook also hired Atlantic
Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its
head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over
its empire to current and former national security state officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight
from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic
Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a
surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of
a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British
Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and
psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with
the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI
to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform
has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced that
it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the
NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread
incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression
from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by
the government.
The First Casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon
big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published
last Monday written by a host of national security state officials,
including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former
CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of
the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech
monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology
platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need
to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the
narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign
adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter
are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security
efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the
hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet
and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state,
the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed
propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control
the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days
before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the
accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and
activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording
videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or
“inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had
claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in
what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to
a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would
have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were
using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be
deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political
figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike.
The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet
because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military
group to be terrorists, Facebook explained,
“We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the
U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority
viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language –
because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
In a nutshell, Edward Snowden disclosed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to eavesdrop on everyone's phone calls, read their text messages, emails, internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people's cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
Based on these disclosures, it is estimated that the US and its allies have visibility into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
None of these federal agencies should have been doing this to U.S. citizens, on US soil and that the mechanism exploited to achieve this panoptic surveillance capability was cooperation by the Level 3 Internet carriers. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint etc, were providing the "keys" to their networks to the government to provide this access.
The government is not supposed to take your data wothout a warrant but a private company can give it to them in circumvention of the 4th amendment. The real issue here is NOT whether a company will give your data to the govt with or without a warrant.
One thing you should be aware of is that this framing of the debate is pushed by the government because it favors their position. However, the real fight we should be focused on is not whether a warrant has been served, rather, it should be focused on WHO the warrant is being served upon.
Consider the mail as an example. If I send you a package that the governmentt wants to snoop on, they cannot serve a warrant on the mail carrier in possession of the package to get access to it (even if it's a private company like UPS, FedEx, etc). That's because the laws about mail were passed long before the Patriot Act when the government still respected the rights of citizens. US mail actually can be subject to search warrant. It appears that the warrant is served on the mail facility and not the sender or recipient (see page 31), HOWEVER, it must be a federal warrant.
Second, it seems pretty clear that these cases are almost entirely restricted to investigations of cases involving the mail itself, such as mail fraud ... this means that this pertains the sender abusing the mail, not the recipient. One's digital data should be treated more like the recipient of mail since the analogy of your digital data is more like you storing things in a lock box in your house. (Recipients of mail generally cannot be prosecuted until they take possession of the mail, obviating this entire issue.)
It should work the same way with your data. If the government wants my info from Twitter, they should be compelled to serve warrants on BOTH Twitter AND me. We should BOTH have the opportunity to inspect the warrant, fight it, etc.
The reason is that the amount of leverage the government has over companies is very high because like Joe Nacchio learned in 2009 - a company has a huge attack surface across a huge array of different facets while the cost of caving to government surveillance demands is relatively small.
For you, though, if your freedom is at risk, there's nothing else exposed for the government to leverage to get you to do what they want. They're already going after everything. So even companies like Google that vigorously defend warrants would have a tough time fighting the government on something the government really wanted to get because there's so much the government can do to strong arm them.
And then of course, most companies don't have the resources to mount a defense like Google could on your behalf, even if they wanted to. There are vanishingly few civically-minded companies that even want to. No one has an interest in protecting your data more than you do, so you should get a warrant just like the mail.
Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA
asserted that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.
"They
told (Qwest) they didn't want to [run the proposal by the FISA court]
because FISA might not agree with them," one NSA insider told USA Today.
There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."
Furthermore,
Nacchio felt that it was unclear who would have access to Qwest
customers' information and how that information might be used. Sources
told Cauley that the NSA said government agencies including the FBI, CIA, and DEA might have access to its massive database.
consortiumnews |Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.
No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger,
at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to
be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’
of such a key research area.”
Of
course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never
be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such
as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer:
“Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have
ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to
advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition
that LifeLog provoked.”
So
Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention
pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to
cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data
at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise,
but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users
with the U.S. national security state.
The
resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter – incapable of
recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly
integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly
coined as the MICIMATT
(military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think
tank complex).
In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating “the collapse of journalism and democracy.”
Facebook
“fact-checking professional journalists” does not even qualify as
pathetic. Otherwise Facebook – and not analysts like McGovern – would
have debunked Russiagate. It would not routinely cancel Palestinian
journalists and analysts. It would not disable the account of University
of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi – who was actually born in the
U.S.
I
received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook –
and now by Twitter – is a badge of honor. Well, everything is
impermanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Daoism). So being deleted –
twice – by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.
technet |Open Letter from Former Defense, Intelligence, Homeland
Security, and Cyber Officials Calling for National Security Review of
Congressional Tech Legislation
April 18, 2022
This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing
between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the
tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and
the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global
order. We must confront these global challenges.
U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the
real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in
Ukraine, including the atrocities committed in Bucha, and the incredible
bravery of the Ukrainian people who continue to stand their ground.
Social media platforms are filled with messages of support for Ukraine
and fundraising campaigns to help Ukrainian refugees.
At the same time, President Putin and his regime have sought to twist
facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an
aggressor. When reporting and images of the atrocities in Bucha began to
circulate, along with evidence and testimony pointing to Russian forces
as the perpetrators, the Kremlin was quick to label the claims
as “fake news.” The Russian government is seeking to alter the
information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving
content that would show the true facts on the ground – and it has
already received buy-in from other like-minded states, such as China,
whose social media platform TikTok continues to abide by Moscow’s rules
of “digital authoritarianism.” Indeed, it is telling that among the
Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in
Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian
citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort
through lies and disinformation.
U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a
light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. Through their efforts,
the world knows what is truly happening in cities from Mariupol to Kiev,
undistorted by manipulation from Moscow. Providing timely and accurate
on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation
from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world
(including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s
aggression and is increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national
security efforts. It is our belief that these efforts will play a part
in helping to end this war.
Meanwhile, cybersecurity threats from authoritarian regimes are also on the rise. As President Biden recently announced,
the United States is facing an extraordinary threat from Russian
cyber-attacks, and the private sector “must accelerate efforts to lock
their digital doors.” In response to this heightened threat environment,
U.S. technology companies have accelerated their partnership with the
U.S. government and its allies to improve our collective defense. Both
in public and behind the scenes, these companies have rolled out
integrated cyber defenses, rapidly fused threat intelligence across
products and services, and moved quickly to block malicious actors on
their platforms. This partnership has resulted in the detection and
disruption of a series of significant security threats from Russia and
Belarus.
In the face of these growing threats, U.S. policymakers must not
inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to counter
increasing disinformation and cybersecurity risks, particularly as the
West continues to rely on the scale and reach of these firms to push
back on the Kremlin. But recently proposed congressional legislation
would unintentionally curtail the ability of these platforms to target
disinformation efforts and safeguard the security of their users in the
U.S. and globally. Legislation from both the House and Senate requiring
non-discriminatory access for all “business users” (broadly defined to
include foreign rivals) on U.S. digital platforms would provide an open
door for foreign adversaries to gain access to the software and
hardware of American technology companies. Unfettered access to software
and hardware could result in major cyber threats, misinformation,
access to data of U.S. persons, and intellectual property theft. Other
provisions in this legislation would damage the capability of U.S.
technology companies to roll out integrated security tools to adequately
screen for nefarious apps and malicious actors, weakening security
measures currently embedded in device and platform operating systems.
Our national security greatly benefits from the capacity of these
platforms to detect and act against these types of risks and, therefore,
must not be unintentionally impeded.
We call on the congressional committees with national security
jurisdiction – including the Armed Services Committees, Intelligence
Committees, and Homeland Security Committees in both the House and
Senate – to conduct a review of any legislation that could hinder
America’s key technology companies in the fight against cyber and
national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing
digital authoritarianism. Such a review would ensure that legislative
proposals do not enhance our adversaries’ capabilities. It is imperative
that the United States avoid the pitfalls of its key allies and
partners, such as the European Union (EU), whose Digital Markets Act
(DMA) passed without any consideration of national security
repercussions – despite repeated concerns from the Biden administration, including over potential cybersecurity risks. There were also bipartisan congressional fears
that the DMA would benefit “powerful state-owned and subsidized Chinese
and Russian companies,” which could have “negative impacts on internet
users’ privacy, security, and free speech.” Even in light of these
security concerns, the EU’s refusal to undertake a national security
assessment led to none of them being addressed. The U.S. government must
not make this same mistake.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in
global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the
test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology
sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of
events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.
Sincerely,
James R. Clapper Former Director of National Intelligence
Jane Harman Former U.S. Representative from California Former Ranking Member, House Intelligence Committee
Jeh C. Johnson Former Secretary of Homeland Security†
Michael J. Morell Former Acting Director and Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Leon E. Panetta Former Secretary of Defense Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency
Admiral Michael S. Rogers Former Commander, U.S. Cyber Command Former Director, National Security Agency
Frances F. Townsend Former Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security
CTH | The metaphorical Jack had a great idea, open a coffee shop where the
beverages were free and use internal advertising as the income subsidy
to operate the business. Crowds came for the free coffee, comfy
couches, fellowship, conversation and enjoyment.
It didn’t matter where Jack got the coffee, how he paid for it, or
didn’t, or what product advertising the customers would be exposed to
while there. Few people thought about such things. Curiously, it
didn’t matter what size the crowd was; in the backroom of Jack’s Coffee
Shop they were able to generate massive amounts of never-ending free
coffee at extreme scales.
I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the legacy Internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.
Over time, using the justification of parking lot capacity and
township regulations, not everyone would be able to park and enter.
Guards were placed at the entrance to pre-screen customers. A debate
began.
Alternative coffee shops opened around town. It was entirely
possible to duplicate Jacks Coffee Shop, yet no one could duplicate the
business model for the free coffee. Indeed, there was something very unique about Jack’s Coffee Shop. Thus, some underlying suspicions were raised:
The only way Twitter, with 217
million users, could exist as a viable platform is if they had access to
tech systems of incredible scale and performance, and those systems
were essentially free or very cheap. The only entity that could
possibly provide that level of capacity and scale is the United States
Government – combined with a bottomless bank account. A public-private
partnership.
If my hunch is correct, Elon Musk is
poised to expose the well-kept secret that most social media platforms
are operating on U.S. government tech infrastructure and indirect
subsidy. Let that sink in.
The U.S. technology system, the
assembled massive system of connected databases and server networks, is
the operating infrastructure that offsets the cost of Twitter to run
their own servers and database. The backbone of Twitter is the United
States government.
FREE COFFEE:
♦ June 2013: […] “Cloud computing is one of the core
components of the strategy to help the IC discover, access and share
critical information in an era of seemingly infinite data.” … “A test
scenario described by GAO in its June 2013 bid protest
opinion suggests the CIA sought to compare how the solutions presented
by IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) could crunch massive data sets,
commonly referred to as big data.” … “Solutions had to provide a
“hosting environment for applications which process vast amounts of
information in parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of
commodity hardware” using a platform called MapReduce. Through
MapReduce, clusters were provisioned for computation and segmentation.
Test runs assumed clusters were large enough to process 100 terabytes of
raw input data. AWS’ solution received superior marks from CIA
procurement officials”… (MORE)
♦ November 2013: […] “Twitter closed its first day of trading on Nov. 7, 2013, at $44.90 a share. In the years since then, it briefly traded above $70, but more recently, it has struggled.”
Jack’s free coffee shop has been for sale, but there’s no viable
business model in the private sector. No one has wanted to purchase
Twitter – it is simply unsustainable; the data processing costs exceed
the capacity of the platform to generate revenue – until now….
thegrayzone |The death by starvation of Etwariya
Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand,
might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more
widespread trend.
Like 1.3 billion of her fellow
Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system
called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her
monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to
register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration.
Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was
repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her
home.
Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion
the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments
to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly
food rations.
A similarly cruel fate was reserved for Santoshi Kumari,
an 11-year-old girl, also from Jharkhand, who reportedly died begging
for rice after her family’s ration card was canceled because it had not
been linked to their Aadhaar digital ID.
These three heart-rending casualties
were among a spate of deaths in rural India in 2017 which came as a
direct result of the Aadhaar digital ID system.
With over one billion Indians in its
database, Aadhaar is the largest biometric digital ID program ever
constructed. Besides serving as a portal to government services, it
tracks users’ movements between cities, their employment status, and
purchasing records. It is a de facto social credit system that serves as
the key entry point for accessing services in India.
Having branded Aadhaar’s creator,
fellow billionaire Nandan Nilekani, as a “hero,” initiatives backed by
tech oligarch Bill Gates have long sought to bring the “Aadhaar approach
to other countries.” With the onset of the
Covid-19 crisis, Gates and other mavens of the digital ID industry have
an unprecedented opportunity to introduce their programs into the wealthy countries of the Global North.
For those yearning for an end to
pandemic-related restrictions, credential programs certifying their
vaccination against Covid-19 have been marketed as the key to reopening
the economy and restoring their personal freedom. But the implementation
of immunity passports is also accelerating the establishment of a
global digital identity infrastructure.
As the military surveillance firm and NATO contractor Thales recently put it, vaccine passports “are a precursor to digital ID wallets.”
And as the CEO of iProove, a biometric ID company and Homeland Security contractor, emphasized to Forbes,
“The evolution of vaccine certificates will actually drive the whole
field of digital ID in the future. So, therefore, this is not just about
Covid, this is about something even bigger.”
For the national security state,
digital immunity passports promise unprecedented control over
populations wherever such systems are implemented. Ann Cavoukian, the
former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada has described
the vaccine passport system already active in her province as “a new,
inescapable web of surveillance with geolocation data being tracked
everywhere.”
thedrive | The Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base has
released a new analysis of the Department of Defense’s investments into directed energy technologies,
or DE. The report, titled “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” makes
predictions about what the state of DE weapons and applications will be
40 years from now and offers a range of scenarios in which the United
States might find itself either leading the field in DE or lagging
behind peer-state adversaries. In examining the current state of the art
of this relatively new class of weapons, the authors claim that the
world has reached a “tipping point” in which directed energy is now
critical to successful military operations.
One of the document’s most eyebrow-raising predictions is that a “force field” could be created by “a sufficiently large fleet or constellation of high-altitude DEW systems”
that could provide a "missile defense umbrella, as part of a layered
defense system, if such concepts prove affordable and necessary.” The
report cites several existing examples of what it calls “force fields,”
including the Active Denial System, or “pain ray,” as well as non-kinetic counter-drone systems, and potentially counter-missile systems, that use high-power microwaves to disable or destroy
their targets. Most intriguingly, the press release claims that “the
concept of a DE weapon creating a localized force field may be just on
the horizon.”
In a press release accompanying the document, AFRL’s Directed
Energy Deputy Chief Scientist Jeremy Murray-Krezan adds that current
directed energy technology is “not quite Star Wars," but adds that the
AFRL is "getting close.” The document describes advances occurring both
in the private sector and the Department of Defense that are driving the
size and weight of DE systems down while increasing power, making the
kinds of weapons dreamed about in science fiction seem more like
reality. The authors describe the concept in more detail:
The “holy grail” from a military
utility perspective is a DE weapon system effective enough, favorable
from a SWAP perspective, and affordable enough to provide a
nuclear/missile umbrella. Although a concept often associated with
science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE defense systems
effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and
relatively soft targets today. Airborne and space-based DE platforms
could achieve a greater area defense and multipoint defenses, for a
broader coverage missile umbrella.
“By 2060 we can predict that DE systems will become more
effective, and this idea of a force field includes methods to destroy
other threats too,” Murray-Krezan said in the press release. “Eventually
there may be potential to achieve the penultimate goal of a Nuclear or
ballistic missile umbrella. It’s fun to think about what that might be
in 2060, but we don't want to speculate too much.”
nationalinterest | The Pentagon is massively fast-tracking its
Next-Generation Interceptor program to deploy a missile defense
technology capable of tracking and destroying a new sphere of enemy
threats to include high-speed, precision-guided intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and hypersonic weapons potentially traveling
through space.
Mobile ICBM launchers, nuclear weapons
traveling at hypersonic speeds, multiple precision-guided re-entry
vehicles and multiple missiles attack at once, each with several
separating warheads are all very serious threats the Missile Defense
Agency (MDA) and industry are working quickly to counter through a
series of innovations, science and technology efforts, new weapons
development such as a Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) initiative aimed
at deploying a new missile defense weapon by the end of the decade.
Intended to introduce paradigm-changing technologies, the emerging
NGI is being engineered to destroy multiple ICBMs at one time while also
distinguishing actual ICBMs from debris, decoys or enemy
countermeasures. This requires a new measure of seeker discernment able
to discriminate actual threats from decoys or track multiple threats at
once.
The initial thinking was that the new NGI will emerge by the end
of the decade, and it now appears the MDA is working with a
Raytheon-Northrop Grumman NGI team to see if the timeframe can be accelerated and possibly
be ready by as early as 2028. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Missiles
& Defense are slated to provide the interceptor booster, kill
vehicle, ground systems, fire control and engagement coordination for
the country’s Ground Midcourse Defense (GMD) system.
Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said the
Pentagon’s number one requirement with the NGI is “speed and schedule,”
adding “we’ll be testing a little bit earlier.”
While a lot of detail about the technological configuration and
components of the emerging NGI are likely not available for security
reasons, the Pentagon’s request to industry did mention the possibility
of engineering a single interceptor able to carry multiple kill
vehicles.
“It is a really complex threat set and there is a lot of complex technology coming forward,” Hill said.
Northrop Grumman has partnered with Raytheon on an NGI development program to optimize innovations and technical progress from
each company through programs such as Northrop’s Ground Based Strategic
Deterrent ICBM and Raytheon’s Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor,
both of which harness breakthrough technologies in the areas of sensing
discrimination, targeting precision, range and functional reliability.
dailycaller | The Democratic National Committee reportedly wants Short Message
Service (SMS) carriers to step in and police private text messages as
part of a new push against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.
Allies
of President Joe Biden, including the DNC, plan to “engage
fact-checkers more aggressively” and work alongside phone companies to
combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private
SMS messages, according to a Monday report from Politico.
White House officials are particularly frustrated with the characterization by some Republicans of their door-to-door pro-vaccination campaign, according to the report.
One example SMS message cited by Politico was sent by conservative
activist group Turning Point USA, in which co-founder Charlie Kirk
falsely contends that “Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you
take a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition to: No medical raids in
America.”
“When
we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an
impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from
calling that out,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz told Politico.
Big Tech platforms and corporate media outlets have consistently cracked down
on alleged “misinformation” throughout the pandemic, but in some cases,
they’ve censored or suppressed information that turned out to be true.
Perhaps the chief example is the lab-leak theory, which hypothesizes
that the pandemic originated from an accidental leak of the virus out of
the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The Biden administration
has blamed misinformation for contributing to vaccine hesitancy and
slowing down the country’s vaccination campaign. Biden set a goal of
achieving a 70% vaccination rate by July 4, but the U.S. fell just short
of that benchmark.
“The failure to provide accurate public
health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the
accessibility of them to people across the country, including South
Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider
that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week.
privacytogo | In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“
Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the
Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers
(think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).
And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to
streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world
in their own image.
To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.
He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a
card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes
Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department
doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice
and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments
they disapproved of.
More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks.
Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?
The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.
There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.
Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.
Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.
And
Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime
change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.
Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s
former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of
reality.
And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.
NYTimes | President Biden’s call for a 90-day
sprint to understand the origins of the coronavirus pandemic came after
intelligence officials told the White House they had a raft of
still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis
that might shed light on the mystery, according to senior administration
officials.
The officials declined to
describe the new evidence. But the revelation that they are hoping to
apply an extraordinary amount of computer power to the question of
whether the virus accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory suggests
that the government may not have exhausted its databases of Chinese
communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the
outbreak of the disease around the city of Wuhan.
In
addition to marshaling scientific resources, Mr. Biden’s push is
intended to prod American allies and intelligence agencies to mine
existing information — like intercepts, witnesses or biological evidence
— as well as hunt for new intelligence to determine whether the Chinese
government covered up an accidental leak.
Mr.
Biden committed on Thursday to making the results of the review public,
but added a caveat: “unless there’s something I’m unaware of.”
His call for the study has both domestic
and international political ramifications. It prompted his critics to
argue that the president had dismissed the possibility that the lab was
the origin until the Chinese government this week rejected allowing
further investigation by the World Health Organization. And,
administration officials said, the White House hopes American allies
will contribute more vigorously to a serious exploration of a theory
that, until now, they considered at best unlikely, and at worst a
conspiracy theory.
So far, the effort
to glean evidence from intercepted communications within China, a
notoriously hard target to penetrate, has yielded little. Current and
former intelligence officials say they strongly doubt anyone will find
an email or a text message or a document that shows evidence of a lab
accident.
One allied nation passed on information that three workers in the Wuhan
virological laboratory were hospitalized with serious flulike symptoms
in the autumn of 2019. The information about the sickened workers is
considered important, but officials cautioned that it did not constitute
evidence that they caught the virus at the laboratory — they may have
brought it there.
WaPo’s phrasing is insidious:“vaccine passports – that would allow Americans to prove that they
have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to
reopen." First, “allow Americans to prove” is bizarre language. I can try to
prove anything. I do not need the federal government’s help to prove
anything, necessarily. And to what extent does a government app prove
anything? Are fake ID’s held by teenagers not
a thing? Second, “as businesses try to reopen.” Try? Business closures were by government edict.
WaPo | The
Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a
standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine
passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been
vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.
The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy
this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines
to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before
opening their doors again.
The
administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the
Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to
health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month
took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the
work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of
announcing updates in coming days, said one official.
The
White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative,
instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials
made this month.
“Our
role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be
simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on
paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients
said at a March 12 briefing.
The
initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration,
with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a
variety of experts, including military officials helping administer
vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.
The
passports are expected to be free and available through applications
for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an
airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be
able to print out the passports, developers have said.
Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.
U.S.
officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including
data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all
Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been
vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked
or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are
already starting to appear.
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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 ...
