Category: Surveillance

  • In recent days, Pegasus, the name of Israeli spyware implicated in everything from the murder of journalists to the surveillance of world leaders, has been splashed across headlines around the globe. Reports in the Washington Post, The Guardian, and 15 other media outlets, as well as Amnesty International, which uncovered the spyware’s reach, revealed that Pegasus, sold by the Israeli company NSO, was used in attempts to track the most intimate details of thousands of people, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, as well as hundreds of human rights activists, journalists and lawyers around the globe. The revelations have prompted Haaretz columnist Eitay Mack to declare in no uncertain terms that “Israel’s NSO and Pegasus are a real and present danger to democracy all over the world.”

    The post Scheer Intelligence: Why The Israeli Spy Export Pegasus Is A Danger To Freedom appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    In the wake of this week’s revelations about the Pegasus spyware, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and two journalists with French and Moroccan dual nationality, Omar Brouksy and Maati Monjib, have filed a joint complaint with prosecutors in Paris.

    They are calling on them to “identify those responsible, and their accomplices” for targeted harassment of the journalists.

    The complaint does not name NSO Group, the Israeli company that makes Pegasus, but it targets the company and was filed in response to the revelations that Pegasus has been used to spy on at least 180 journalists in 20 countries, including 30 in France.

    Drafted by RSF lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, the complaint cites invasion of privacy (article 216-1 of the French penal code), violation of the secrecy of correspondence (article 226-15), fraudulent collection of personal data (article 226- 18), fraudulent data introduction and extraction and access to automated data systems (articles 323-1 and 3, and 462-2), and undue interference with the freedom of expression and breach of the confidentiality of sources (article 431-1).

    This complaint is the first in a series that RSF intends to file in several countries together with journalists who were directly targeted.

    The complaint makes it clear that NSO Group’s spyware was used to target Brouksy and Monjib and other journalists the Moroccan authorities wanted to silence.

    The author of two books on the Moroccan monarchy and a former AFP correspondent, Brouksy is an active RSF ally in Morocco.

    20-day hunger strike
    Monjib, who was recently defended by RSF, was released by the Moroccan authorities on March 23 after a 20-day hunger strike, and continues to await trial.

    “We will do everything to ensure that NSO Group is convicted for the crimes it has committed and for the tragedies it has made possible,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

    “We have filed a complaint in France first because this country appears to be a prime target for NSO Group customers, and because RSF’s international’s headquarters are located here. Other complaints will follow in other countries. The scale of the violations that have been revealed calls for a major legal response.”

    After revelations by the Financial Times in 2019 about attacks on the smartphones of around 100 journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents, several lawsuits were filed against NSO Group, including one by the WhatsApp messaging service in California.

    The amicus brief that RSF and other NGOs filed in this case said: “The intrusions into the private communications of activists and journalists cannot be justified on grounds of security or defence, but are carried out solely with the aim of enabling government opponents to be tracked down and gagged.

    “NSO Group nonetheless continues to provide surveillance technology to its state clients, knowing that they are using it to violate international law and thereby failing in its responsibility to respect human rights.”

    RSF included NSO Group in its list of “digital predators” in 2020.

    Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest.  The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ caused a global rush towards encryption.  Governments, left groping in the dark, sought out private providers of surveillance devices in an unregulated market.  Not only could they get effective spyware; they could do so at very affordable prices.

    The NSO Group was one such provider.  It sees its mission was a noble thing, marketing itself as a creator of “technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.”

    The company also emphasises their mission to target those “terrorists” and “criminals” who have gone dark.  “The world’s most dangerous offenders communicate using technology designed to shield their communications, while government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies struggle to collect evidence and intelligence on their activities.”  The group insists that its “products help government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies use technology to meet the challenges of encryption to prevent and investigate terror and crime.”

    Forbidden Stories, a network of journalists with a mission “to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”, sees things differently.  One of the topics that figures prominently in the ranks is the Pegasus project, a collective journalism effort of global proportion coordinated by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International’s Security Lab.  Its primary purpose: to expose the depredations of the Pegasus spyware, the golden child of the NSO Group.

    Pegasus is a rather vicious thing, enabling those deploying it to access a phone’s contents and remotely access its microphone and camera functions, turning into a surveillance device.  It was given a gloss of notoriety in 2018 when it was revealed that Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz had been one of its victims.  Abdulaziz claimed that communications with journalist Jamal Khashoggi, butchered by a Saudi squad of assassins in Istanbul in October 2018, were intercepted by the Saudi authorities because of the spyware.  His lawyers argued that the hacking “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”

    On July 18, Phineas Rueckert of Forbidden Stories revealed that some 180 journalists had been selected as targets by some 10 NSO customers across 20 countries.  He begins with the Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, whose phone was “regularly infected with Pegasus” for almost three years.  Ismayilova was baffled on realising how the security of her phone had been compromised.  “I feel guilty for the messages I’ve sent.  I feel guilty for the sources who sent me [information] thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure and they didn’t know that my phone is infected.”

    Details are then supplied.  Both Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a leak of more than 50,000 records of phone numbers selected by NSO clients for surveillance reasons.  The clients are a varied bunch, from those of the autocratic flavour – Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia – to the more democratic ones, such as India and Mexico.  The NSO Group, in a letter to Forbidden Stories, claimed it could not “confirm or deny the identity of our government customers” for “contractual and national security considerations”.  Rueckert admits that identifying instances where the specific phone number was compromised would be difficult short of actually analysing the device.  But, with the assistance of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, “forensics analyses on the phones of more than a dozen of these journalists – and 67 phones in total – [revealed] successful infections through a security flaw in iPhones as recently as this month.”

    The Pegasus project is significant for revealing the sheer scale of espionage.  The Guardian, a participating media outlet, promises to reveal more details about targets that “include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.”  At this writing, a rather juicy detail has come to light: the potential targeting of French President Emmanuel Macron by Morocco using Pegasus.

    The NSO response to the Forbidden Stories report was snootily dismissive. The account was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources.”  The company ducks the issue by suggesting that the information gathered on the individuals in question could have been obtained via other services.  “The claims that the data was leaked from our servers, is a complete lie and ridiculous since such data never existed on our servers.”

    As for the murder of Khashoggi, old defences are resurrected.  “We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry.  We previously investigated this claim, which again, is being made without validation.”

    For an outfit such as the NSO Group, such rebuttals have proven to be meaningless.  Twin lawsuits against NSO filed in Israel and Cyprus by a Qatari citizen and by Mexican journalists in 2018 revealed extensive evidence of the company’s complicity in illegal surveillance.  NSO also failed to get the lawsuit by Abdulaziz dismissed, and was ordered to pay his legal costs, with the judge Guy Hyman calling the case “broad, especially in matters of the roots of constitutional values and fundamental rights”.  In 2019, WhatsApp brought an action against the company, claiming that Pegasus had been used to target 1400 user accounts.  For WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart, the Pegasus project reporting revealed “what we and others have been saying for years; NSO’s dangerous spyware is used to commit horrible human rights abuses all around the world and must be stopped.”

    The Pegasus project has shed more light on the government revolt against encryption, one facilitated by private enterprise.  Left unregulated, the NSO Group and its competitors can operate with vigilante disdain and amoral proficiency.  David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has wisely called for a moratorium on the sale of such spyware, describing an industry “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sort of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.  Control, accountability and constraint have never quite featured in the NSO Group operations manual.

    The post Pegasus Rides Again: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amnesty Int’l Calls for Moratorium on Private Spyware After Pegasus Revelations

    Calls are growing for stricter regulations on the use of surveillance technology after revelations that countries have used the powerful Pegasus spyware against politicians, journalists and activists around the world. The Pegasus software, sold by the Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group, can secretly infect a mobile phone and harvest its information. While the company touts Pegasus as intended for criminals and terrorists, leaked data suggests the tool is widely abused by governments to go after political opponents and dissidents, according to reporting from The Pegasus Project, an international consortium of 17 media organizations. We feature a PBS “Frontline” report on the shocking findings that the Israeli government allowed NSO to continue to do business with Saudi Arabia even after the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in 2018 in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, and allegedly used Pegasus to surveil Khashoggi’s fiancée. “Contrary to what NSO is claiming, the spyware Pegasus is used to target people absolutely unrelated to criminal activities or terrorism,” says Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International. She adds that The Pegasus Project has exposed that abuse of powerful surveillance technology “is systematic, and it is global.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the shocking findings of The Pegasus Project, an international collaboration of 17 media organizations that investigated the Israeli cybersurveillance company NSO Group. The NSO Group manufactures and sells advanced spyware to governments called Pegasus that can secretly infect a mobile phone and harvest its information. The company claims its spyware is meant to target terrorists and criminals, but data leaked to The Pegasus Project suggests several countries use the powerful cyberespionage tool to spy on activists, politicians, dissidents and journalists.

    The consortium analyzed a leaked data set of 50,000 phone numbers that allegedly belong to persons of interest to NSO’s customers. A sample showed dozens of cases of successful and attempted Pegasus infections. The reporting also revealed a massive wave of attacks by NSO Group’s customers on iPhones, potentially affecting thousands of Apple users worldwide. In one of the most shocking findings, The Pegasus Project reported the Israeli government allowed NSO to continue to do business with Saudi Arabia, even after the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in 2018 in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

    In a minute, we’ll speak with the secretary general of Amnesty International and one of the lead reporters on The Pegasus Project. But first, this is a PBS Frontline report that follows Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, one of the more than 80 journalists working on The Pegasus Project, as she traveled to Turkey and verify if Pegasus had been used to surveil Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. The report was coordinated by the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

    NARRATOR: On October 2nd, 2018, journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Turkey and never came back out. Around the time of his murder, a powerful spyware may have been used to surveil his family.

    REPORTER: Activists, journalists, all are said to have been hacked by spyware developed by the Israeli company called the NSO Group.

    NARRATOR: A consortium of news outlets from around the world, including Frontline, have been investigating the use of the spyware called Pegasus and the Israeli company NSO Group that sells it to foreign governments.

    BILL MARCZAK: The government can see anything on the phone, including pictures, contacts, listening in to calls.

    NARRATOR: As part of the investigation into Pegasus, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest traveled to Istanbul. Working with the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, the reporters were given access to 50,000 phone numbers concentrated in countries known to be NSO clients. They included journalists, politicians, human rights activists and Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. Dana Priest and a producer working for Frontline and Forbidden Stories met with Hatice to verify if her phone had in fact been hacked.

    PRODUCER: What I’m doing is basically a backup. And then, based on this backup, we will look if there is any trace of infection past occurred. What we’re looking for is traces of a software called Pegasus.

    HATICE CENGIZ: I remember the first days after the murder, a lot of times they tried to hack my email. Hmm. And then Gmail was sending to me emails all the time: “Someone tried to open your account,” or something like that.

    DANA PRIEST: The simple ones are like that message. The really sophisticated ones, they don’t need a message. They don’t need you to do anything.

    HATICE CENGIZ: Really?

    DANA PRIEST: Yeah.

    HATICE CENGIZ: But why do people say the iPhone, they’re more safe to — no one can hack or —

    DANA PRIEST: That’s what the iPhone says, the company. But it’s not true. So, the Pegasus software can, if it gets inside — I don’t know if it gets inside every time it tries, but if it gets inside, it can turn your microphone on, so that it can — whoever is doing it can listen to what you’re saying and what other people are saying. But it also can go into your email, your WhatsApp, your contacts, your pictures, your videos, and it can just steal them all, make a copy of everything. And then, you know, our thought is, if it’s doing that against people like you, who are not terrorists or criminals, then why? Part of what we want to show, and what we think we know, what we are discovering and what we’re researching, is, no, they use it against civilians. And why would they want to know what you’re doing?

    HATICE CENGIZ: Yes, it’s my personal life. It’s my secret life. It is not enough to say, “Please, stop, after this murder. Please.” Yeah, it is — it’s horror.

    NARRATOR: After getting backups of both Hatice’s new phone and the one she was using at the time of Khashoggi’s murder, Dana Priest sent them to Amnesty International’s Security Lab for analysis. A few hours later, while on the way back to the airport, she received a call with the results.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: I guess just pretty bad news is never-ending. So, I checked both the uploads. The new one seems clean to me. The old one, however, has some traces. It’s consistent with what we have seen.

    DANA PRIEST: Oh.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: So, on the 6th of October of 2018 seems to have been a first — a first compromise, which was followed by some additional traces on the 9th and then on the 12th, which is obviously, as you know, pretty timely, within the context, obviously.

    DANA PRIEST: Yeah. Wow. She has already been infected, so it’s already happened.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: Yeah.

    DANA PRIEST: So it’s great that you’re finding it.

    TECHNOLOGY EXPERT: Yeah, I don’t think the…

    NARRATOR: There was now proof that Pegasus had been used to target one of the people closest to Jamal Khashoggi around the time of his death. In a statement, NSO Group said its technology was not associated in any way with Khashoggi’s murder. The company said it was on a lifesaving mission, preventing terror attacks and serious crimes. But in addition to Hatice, Frontline, Forbidden Stories and the partner news outlets are investigating the cases of journalists, human rights activists, politicians and others in more than 50 countries who may have been targeted for surveillance.

    AMY GOODMAN: That video report part of an upcoming Frontline documentary, produced with Forbidden Stories, to air on PBS. And that last reporter voice, Dana Priest of The Washington Post, who went to visit Khashoggi’s fiancée in Turkey and found her phone infected.

    For more, we go to London to speak with Dr. Agnès Callamard, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, previously the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. As U.N. special rapporteur, she led an investigation into the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. She was also director of the Global Freedom of Expression Project at Columbia University.

    Dr. Callamard, welcome to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your new position at Amnesty International. This is explosive information you are releasing right now, Amnesty working with the Forbidden Stories project. Let’s start with the example of Jamal Khashoggi and what this says about what to many may be the first time they’re hearing about this spyware produced by Israel.

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Well, what it first shows is what you have highlighted, that contrary to what NSO is claiming, the spyware Pegasus is used to target people absolutely unrelated to criminal activities or terrorism. It is used to target individuals like Hatice, the family or friends of human rights defenders and journalists. It is used to target journalists and human rights defenders. In fact, according to Amnesty International, at least 180 journalists have been targeted.

    I think what the project is showing is the breadth and the scale of the abuse. We already had an element of anecdotal evidence that the spyware had been used to target human rights defenders. What we have with Pegasus Project is actually the demonstration that the misuse of the spyware is systematic, and it is global.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Callamard, what do we know about the NSO Group, its relationship to the Israeli government? And does it just sell this software and then no longer has connection with it, or does it somehow maintain an ability to monitor what its clients are doing with the software?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: OK. So, with regard to the first question, the intelligence industry is, for the government of Israel, a very important industry. It’s a strategic industry. It is also an industry that is supposedly regulated, in that every export by NSO is being licensed by the state of Israel. So, that’s the relationship. There is a relationship at the strategic level, and there is relationship at the regulatory level. So, I think the nature of the relationship is pretty close and pretty deep. So, when we talk about NSO’s failure to act with due diligence, we are also talking about the failure of the government of Israel to abide by its obligation under international law. That is the first issue.

    With regard to NSO relationship to its client, it is actually a pretty close relationship, in that NSO has the capacity to close down, to shut down the spyware and any kind of system it is providing to the client. NSO is claiming that it does not have any oversight over the use of the spyware. And, you know, we don’t know that for sure, but that’s what they are claiming. But they do have a sufficient relationship that they can shut down the system, which is why we are calling on them now, given the evidence being provided, that they shut down every single system in place with all of the clients that have been listed by Amnesty and others over the last few days.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden speaking to The Guardian about spyware sales, he says, needing to be stopped.

    EDWARD SNOWDEN: If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect. The way we do that is to halt the trade around this technology.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Agnès Callamard, would you go that far?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Absolutely, absolutely. So, Amnesty International, as well as, in fact, when I was a special rapporteur, I did the same, are calling for a moratorium over the use and the export of that intelligence spywares and that industry, more generally, that needs to be more heavily regulated. We are calling for a moratorium because we believe that in the current conditions and environment, it is impossible to properly monitor how it is going to be used, therefore the only option is for a moratorium over its sale and its export.

    The other point I want to make, following on the journalist that you just interviewed, is that, indeed, that spyware is a weapon. This is the only way we need to look at it. It is a weapon against democracy. It is a weapon against human rights. It is a weapon against freedom of the press, against scrutiny of government. It is a weapon against the justice and fair trial, as we are seeing in Turkey. And it is used extraterritorially, meaning that the government of a country, such as Morocco, can use that spyware to target people on the territory of another country. That goes against every dimension of international law, and certainly against the U.N. Charter. So we are talking here about a pretty bad thing.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, you mentioned Morocco, and I wanted to talk about the Moroccan court yesterday sentencing the independent journalist Omar Radi to six years in prison, arrested last year on what press freedom advocates called “retaliatory charges.” For years Omar has been targeted by Moroccan authorities for his reporting on corruption and human rights. And last year, your organization, Dr. Callamard, Amnesty International, revealed Moroccan authorities had hacked his phone using Pegasus spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group. I spoke to Radi last year, just weeks before he was arrested.

    OMAR RADI: Pegasus is a quite silent program. You don’t feel it, actually. And it’s not a persistent program. It doesn’t stay in your phone or in your computer. It works using a network injection, so people need to be near you to make themselves pass as a relay antenna. And your phone is connected to a fake relay antenna, and then the network injection works, and then the program works, and they get — I don’t know. It has a lot of features. It can use your microphone, it can use your keyboard, it can use your screen, and get any information that is stored in your phone.

    So, I don’t know the amount of information they’ve stolen from my phone. But I’m sure, in this pro-medias — pro-state medias, they published many information that I have exchanged even in Signal, which is known that is a very safe program. So I have evidence that my own conversations have been leaked to pro-state media, the same that are leaking also my bank information.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Moroccan journalist Omar Radi, again, just yesterday, sentenced to six years in prison. Soon after we spoke last year, he was imprisoned. Dr. Agnès Callamard, if you can comment on this case?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: You know, I mean, of course, what we are — what you are describing right now is an incredible miscarriage of justice. But it is also demonstrating how harmful — if we needed to, how harmful that spyware is. It is of course a violation of, let’s say, the right to privacy. But when it is being used, it is the beginning to — it has a domino effect on a range of other violations.

    In the case of Omar Radi, that spying, through the spyware, led to his imprisonment, led to his arbitrary detention. In other cases, even though the causal relationship is of course difficult to establish — in other cases, there are someone such as the Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda being compromised with his phone, and a couple of days later, he is being murdered. We cannot make the causal relationship between the compromise and the murder, but surely the suspicion is there, as it is in the case of Omar, that the spying and the use of the spyware led to his arbitrary detention, and that led to this unlawful imprisonment.

    It is an extremely harmful tool at the hand of governments that will do anything to protect themselves — and not just, by the way, of the usual suspect. In the list of countries that have used the spyware, we found Hungary. We found India. Of course, we found Morocco, but we also found Azerbaijan, Mexico. Mexico, more than 20 journalists have been targeted through the spyware. India, more than 40 journalists have been targeted.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Callamard, I wanted to ask you about a remarkable coincidence, it seems. The very day that these revelations come forward from this international consortium, the United States government suddenly announces that it has found that China was hacking into Microsoft email, and they marshaled condemnation from other governments around the world — an investigation that was going on for months. And also, they suddenly unsealed indictments that occurred back in May of some Chinese hackers. As a result, last night in the national news, a lot of the attention was on China’s hacking, not so much on the revelations that your consortium has unearthed here. Your sense — how does this compare to some of the stuff that supposedly is happening that China is involved in?

    AGNÈS CALLAMARD: Look, we have focused on the privatization of spying and intelligence through a focus on NSO. We know that the surveillance industry is very powerful, and it is completely unregulated. So, that is something that must remain on the international agenda. It does not mean that spying by government is not as crucially important. Of course it is. It may fall under a different form of regulation. I have not followed closely enough the allegations against China and Microsoft. I will say that the overall surveillance world is one that is out of control. It is the Far West. Whether it is powered by a government or powered by a private company, it is equally dangerous for — frankly, for global peace and for democracy. And it must be — it must be scrutinized, and it must be regulated. You know, I can’t comment really on the motivation of the U.S. government and whether they were trying to derail a little bit the focus on NSO. I don’t know whether they did it. My point is that there is an overall world here that we need to control and need to really regulate.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Agnès Callamard is our guest, secretary general of Amnesty International. We’re going to break, come back with her, and we’ll be joined by Nina Lakhani, senior reporter at The Guardian, one of the 17 media organizations who are part of The Pegasus Project. She specifically looked at the Mexican journalist Dr. Callamard just mentioned who was murdered, and also looks at others who are surveilled as targets for potential hacking by NSO’s clients. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A woman talks on her cell phone in front of the headquarters of an international surveillance service

    NSO Group, a private Israeli firm that sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, insists that its Pegasus spyware is used only to “investigate terrorism and crime.” Leaked data, however, reveals that the company’s hacking tool “has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.”

    That’s according to an investigative report published Sunday by the Pegasus Project, a media consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 news outlets in 10 countries. The collaborative endeavor was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with technical assistance from Amnesty International, which conducted “cutting-edge forensic tests” on smartphones to identify traces of the military-grade spyware.

    The Guardian, one of the newspapers involved in the analysis, reported that “Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls, and secretly activate microphones.” The Washington Post, another partner in the investigation, noted that the tool “can infect phones without a click.”

    A massive data leak turned up a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, according to the Post, “are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of… NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry.”

    More phone numbers were based in Mexico than any other country, with over 15,000 on the list, “including those belonging to politicians, union representatives, journalists, and other government critics,” the Post noted.

    As The Guardian reported: “The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.”

    Other nations that either had large shares of numbers on the list or were deemed to be potential government clients of NSO include: France, Hungary, Turkey, Morocco, Togo, Algeria, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.

    While “the presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack,” The Guardian noted, the consortium believes that “the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.”

    Amnesty’s Security Lab analyzed a small sample of phones belonging to activists, journalists, and lawyers whose numbers appeared on the leaked list. Of the 67 phones examined, traces of Pegasus spyware were found on 37 devices, including 23 that had been successfully infected and 14 with signs of attempted hacking.

    “NSO claims its spyware is undetectable and only used for legitimate criminal investigations,” Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Amnesty’s Security Lab, said in a statement. “We have now provided irrefutable evidence of this ludicrous falsehood.”

    According to the Post:

    The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

    The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials—including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.

    Among the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London, and Al Jazeera in Qatar.

    The newspaper added that Amnesty found evidence of NSO’s spyware being used by Saudi Arabia and UAE to target the phones of close associates of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi before and after he was brutally murdered by Saudi operatives in 2018.

    “The Pegasus Project lays bare how NSO’s spyware is a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists, and crush dissent, placing countless lives in peril,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

    “These revelations,” Callamard continued, “blow apart any claims by NSO that such attacks are rare and down to rogue use of their technology. While the company claims its spyware is only used for legitimate criminal and terror investigations, it’s clear its technology facilitates systemic abuse. They paint a picture of legitimacy, while profiting from widespread human rights violations.”

    Callamard emphasized that “[NSO’s] actions pose larger questions about the wholesale lack of regulation that has created a wild west of rampant abusive targeting of activists and journalists.”

    “Until this company and the industry as a whole can show it is capable of respecting human rights,” she added, “there must be an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, and use of surveillance technology.”

    NSO, for its part, issued a statement denying “false claims” in the report, including those related to Khashoggi. Attorneys for the company argued that the Pegasus Project’s investigation was based on “wrong assumptions” and “uncorroborated theories.” The company claimed that it is pursuing a “life-saving mission” to stamp out crime.

    The Guardian noted that while the consortium “found numbers in the data belonging to suspected criminals… the broad array of numbers in the list belonging to people who seemingly have no connection to criminality suggests some NSO clients are breaching their contracts with the company, spying on pro-democracy activists and journalists investigating corruption, as well as political opponents and government critics.”

    According to the Post, “After the investigation began, several reporters in the consortium learned that they or their family members had been successfully attacked with Pegasus spyware.”

    In response, Callamard stressed that “the number of journalists identified as targets vividly illustrates how Pegasus is used as a tool to intimidate critical media. It is about controlling [the] public narrative, resisting scrutiny, and suppressing any dissenting voice.”

    “These revelations must act as a catalyst for change,” said Callamard. “The surveillance industry must no longer be afforded a laissez-faire approach from governments with a vested interest in using this technology to commit human rights violations.”

    The human rights expert demanded that NSO “immediately shut down clients’ systems where there is credible evidence of misuse.” She added that “the Pegasus Project provides this in abundance.”

    NSO stated that it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations.”

    Timothy Summers, a former cyber security engineer at a U.S. intelligence agency and now director of IT at Arizona State University, told the Post that Pegasus “is nasty software.” One could use the technology, said Summers, to “spy on almost the entire world population.”

    The Guardian noted that the Pegasus Project “will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days.”

    Amnesty’s Maynier said that “our hope is the damning evidence published over the next week will lead governments to overhaul a surveillance industry that is out of control.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New York, July 19, 2021 – In response to reports that at least 180 journalists were identified by investigative reporters as possible targets of Pegasus spyware, produced by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Committee to Protect Journalists reaffirmed its call for immediate action by governments and companies around the world to stem abuse of powerful technology that can be used to spy on the press.

    “This report shows how governments and companies must act now to stop the abuse of this spyware which is evidently being used to undermine civil liberties, not just counter terrorism and crime,” said Robert Mahoney, CPJ’s deputy executive director. “No one should have unfettered power to spy on the press, least of all governments known to target journalists with physical abuse and legal reprisals.”

    The reporting, known as the Pegasus Project, was conducted by a consortium including investigative journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and global media outlets such as The Washington Post. Amnesty International, which performed technical analysis, reported that more than 180 journalists had been identified by the consortium on a list of 50,000 phone numbers allegedly linked to clients of NSO Group technology. In a statement emailed to CPJ, an NSO spokesperson said there was nothing to link the 50,000 numbers to NSO Group or Pegasus. In a rebuttal published online, the company said the consortium’s allegations were false.

    NSO has repeatedly told CPJ in the past that it licenses Pegasus to fight crime and terrorism. The July 19 statement said its products were “sold to vetted foreign governments.”

    “NSO Group will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations,” it said. “This includes shutting down of a customers’ system, something NSO has proven its ability and willingness to do, due to confirmed misuse, has done multiple times in the past, and will not hesitate to do again if a situation warrants.”

    CPJ has issued recommendations to policymakers and companies to combat spyware abuse against the media.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • British investor Stephen Peel in ongoing dispute with partners over Luxembourg company linked to spyware firm

    A British financier’s voting rights at a Luxembourg company linked to Novalpina Capital, whose fund owns a majority stake in the spyware firm NSO Group, will remain suspended, a Luxembourg court has ruled.

    Though this may not be permanent, the decision appears to mark a setback for the financier, Stephen Peel, a former Olympic rower, in a bitter legal dispute that has erupted between him and his two longtime business partners, Stefan Kowski and Bastian Lueken.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • As the U.S. marks 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs on June 17, 1971, we speak with journalist Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of the news website Truthout, whose sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Schenwar says her sister’s death came after “a long cycle of criminalization” that made her chances of recovery much harder. “She became so afraid of being rearrested,” says Schenwar, who notes that many drug users avoid seeking medical help because of the fear of police involvement and incarceration. “Why are we supporting criminalization at the expense of people’s actual survival?” she asks. Drug overdoses have soared during the pandemic, causing over 92,000 deaths in the United States in the 12-month period ending in November — the most since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track over two decades ago. Experts say the pandemic and the increasing availability of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have contributed to the death toll.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today with a deadly scourge striking down people at an alarming rate. No, it’s not COVID; it’s drug overdoses. Over 92,000 people died from overdoses in the United States in the 12-month period ending in November — the most since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track over two decades ago. Many experts cite two factors for the surge in deaths: the pandemic and the increasing availability of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. This all comes as the nation marks 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs June 17th, 1971.

    We begin today’s show with someone who lost her sister to an overdose just as the pandemic was starting. Maya Schenwar joins us from Chicago, where she works as editor-in-chief of the news website Truthout. Her sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Maya’s piece about her death is just out; it’s headlined “My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.” Maya is the co-author of Prison by Any Other Name and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

    Maya, welcome to Democracy Now! Our condolences on the death of your sister. The story you tell is heartrending. Tell us the story of Keeley, how she lived — she is also a mother — and how she died.

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

    You know, my sister Keeley was, as you said, a wonderful mother, a writer, an animal lover and a friend. And she died last year, thanks to a long cycle of criminalization. Keeley was incarcerated for the first time when she was 15. And for the next 14 years, she was just cycling in and out of jail and prison, as well as alternatives, like electronic monitoring and drug treatment. And the things that she was arrested for were always related to her addiction, even when they weren’t drug charges. So, she would go to prison. She would become even more deeply traumatized, because that’s what prison does — it traumatizes people. And she would emerge with even fewer opportunities and options. And then she would just go back to heavily using heroin to help deal with that pain.

    And I want to point out real quick: So, heroin, in a vacuum, just like any other drug, is not the problem. People, I think, can use most stigmatized drugs and be OK, you know, even the most stigmatized drugs like heroin. But people are not supported in using drugs and being OK, because they’re criminalized.

    So, while Keeley was incarcerated, horrible things happened to her, like anyone who’s locked up. She experienced violence that was perpetrated by guards. She experienced the daily violence that everyone experiences of strip searches and medical neglect, and really just being called by a number instead of by your name. And also she experienced giving birth to her baby while she was incarcerated, and a prison guard was just sitting there watching her give birth.

    And when Keeley returned to using heroin after her time in prison or a mandated treatment program, each time, she was at a much greater risk of overdose. And this is something I really want to emphasize. This is true for so many people who use drugs who are released from prison. So, within the first couple of weeks after being released, someone’s risk of overdose is almost 13 times higher than it is for the rest of the population. And that’s partly because your tolerance for the drug is lower, because you haven’t been using.

    So, last year, my sister was in a drug treatment program, a drug court program, so a mandatory treatment, and it was based around abstinence, not using the drug, and so her tolerance was reduced. And she was also very scared of being rearrested, because she knew that that would mean returning to prison and being separated from her daughter again. And so she was avoiding seeking any kind of medical help, because it could mean police involvement. So, at that point [inaudible] —

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Maya, I wanted to ask you, in terms of —

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: When she was out of prison, what kind of medical or therapeutic help did she receive during those periods of time? And also, you’ve said that her interactions with police made her situation worse, not better. If you could talk about that, as well?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah, absolutely. So, while she was out of prison, she would occasionally receive some support. She tried to be engaged in medication-assisted treatment, which has proven to support people with heroin addictions. But so much of the treatment that she experienced was based around surveillance and policing. And this is something that we see with many, many people who are criminalized and also use drugs, because it’s inside of the criminal legal system, so we see substance use as a problem that is within the criminal system even if we’re not sending people to jail.

    And so, when people are sent to a mandated drug treatment center, when treatment is mandated, the research shows that that’s not actually effective in helping people recover. And also we have to think about, ethically, you know, whether we should be putting people in a position where they’re mandated to do certain things with their bodies and their minds.

    And so, Keeley was always surveilled. And she was not able to do the things that many of us are able to do to create a meaningful life. You know, she wasn’t given opportunities to pursue her interests, to be with her family in a sustained way. Many of these treatments actually separated her from her family and confined her, just like prison.

    And then, the thing I mention often about policing and the role that it played in her death was she became so afraid of being rearrested. And this is a very common fear among people who use drugs, and particularly among marginalized people who use drugs — Black people, Indigenous people, trans people, people with disabilities and mental health diagnoses. You know, police are targeting them very, very heavily, so it’s a warranted fear. And so, seeking any kind of medical attention, particularly calling 911, can put you at risk for police contact, and that can lead to a return to incarceration. So, even when, in theory, there are options available and people say, “Well, why didn’t you seek help?” it’s like, “Well, you know, why would you seek help if the threat of punishment and torture and trauma is just hanging over your head every single second of the day?”

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — in 2019, Keeley was sentenced to two years in drug court. Explain what that means. And what happened to her after that?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah. So, drug court is a diversion. So, the idea is that someone will be diverted either pretrial or sentenced to treatment instead of prison. And this option has grown substantially in popularity over the past few years. And it’s something that Biden has heavily promoted. It’s often a thing that generates bipartisan enthusiasm.

    But what people aren’t acknowledging is it’s still criminalization. So it still involves arresting people. Just arrest is a trauma. It’s within the criminal legal system, which is built on foundations of white supremacy, and so it’s still targeting people of color, targeting Black people. It’s still operating within a mindset of surveillance, so drug testing people constantly. It’s still operating within a model of abstinence, which we know is not actually the best way to help people survive.

    And so, even though we know all these things, we’re endorsing this program, I think, because — partly, because it’s so hard to break out of this punishment mindset. And we need to challenge ourselves and say, “What are we doing? Why are we supporting criminalization at the expense of people’s actual survival and ability to find support and ability to find resources?”

    You know, I think one really sad thing about all the money that is going into drug policing and drug courts and all of these resources, not only are harming and killing people, but, like the defund police movement has brought up again and again, what could we have if we diverted those resources and spent even more resources, as well, on things like housing and education and noncoercive healthcare and mental healthcare and more recreational opportunities and the arts and ways for people to live meaningful and livable lives and have all kinds of options to support their survival? That’s where we should be directing our energy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Maya, I’d like to go back to June 2014, when your sister, Keeley Schenwar, participated in a panel discussion in Chicago on breastfeeding and incarceration. Keeley read a poem she wrote for her baby daughter while she was incarcerated. Keeley gave birth while she was in prison, was taken away from her newborn daughter only after 24 hours with her.

    KEELEY SCHENWAR: It took me over a month to start writing. It’s so hard for me to think about all I’ve already put you through. Nurses give me updates when the counselors here let me call. They say you’re almost 10 pounds, starting to feel better, and that you love your baths.

    I’m not the one that holds you when you cry or the one that you look at when you open your eyes. It kills me to know that the reality is I’m not a part of your life. I brought you into a world full of great things that are surrounded with pain, that which you already know too well, and I have no choice but to let you handle it all on your own and without a mother.

    I guess you’re not alone. It doesn’t make sense — or, it doesn’t matter, nothing about this feels right. Although I know you won’t remember this, I can’t help but wonder if you feel the emptiness I carry day and night without you close or anywhere in sight.

    I know my handwriting is sometimes sloppy, but it’s late, and I’m writing in the background of the dim prison hallway lights. I’m about to miss your first Halloween, just as I’ve missed these last two months. I wish none of this was — I wish none of this was true, but deep inside, really underneath a whole lot, I know I need to tell you nothing but the truth, which also includes that I love you. I’ll spend the rest of my life making this up to you.

    AMY GOODMAN: That’s Keeley Schenwar back in 2014. I am so sorry, Maya, how difficult this is for you, which makes it all the more brave for you to have written this piece in Truthout and to tell your sister’s stories and her truths. As we talk about her baby being taken away from her so quickly, can you talk about her terror to get help because she was always afraid she’d lose her baby, that they’d take her baby from her, and what you think needs to happen now, and if Cori Bush’s new resolution, that she just introduced into Congress, the People’s Response Act, which would send unarmed, trained professionals to respond to mental health and substance abuse crises instead of police, would make a difference?

    MAYA SCHENWAR: Yes. Thank you, Amy. Thank you for playing that poem. I am overwhelmed. The poem is so beautiful. But it shouldn’t have had to be written.

    Tearing a mother away from her newborn baby is one of the most violent acts in the universe. And it’s perpetrated by our legal system. And I think when we think about the terror of Keeley and so many mothers and parents who use drugs and, more generally, who are criminalized, we have to think about this double punishment, the fact that not only are they under threat of being put into torture chambers — prisons — but also they’re under threat of this deep, deep, wrenching punishment of being torn away. And, of course, for Keeley, that was also the trauma of actually being pregnant and giving birth behind bars.

    And when we look forward and think about, “Well, what can be done?” I think the number one thing we need to be thinking about is end criminalization and policing. And, you know, this might sound like something we’re doing away with instead of introducing, but I think it’s generative, because criminalization and incarceration are traumatizing and torturing people, and they’re also putting us in the mindset that this is all we can do, that this is our go-to solution. Well, you can’t actually administer “treatment” through a system like that. And as we’ve discussed, police are actually making it less likely that people are going to seek emergency help when they really need it.

    And so, I think that, within that, we also need to look at some of the other demands that are being made by organizers working to defund the police and to defend Black lives. And I think that Cori Bush’s legislation does encompass some of that. We need to be fueling resources toward priorities that affirm life, and that includes housing, education, food, healthcare. These things would absolutely reduce overdoses, in addition to all the other many benefits they would have and the ways in which they would build toward creating a more flourishing and meaningful and equitable society. And I think creating nonpolice emergency responses is definitely something we should be funding and fueling. I believe Cori Bush’s bill actually puts funding into existing programs, which is good, and we also need to be lifting up and funding and supporting all of the mutual aid efforts and the efforts that have actually been created by people who use drugs to support people in their survival, come up with creative harm reduction techniques and actually bring those to the community.

    And I think that, in addition — I just want to say real quickly — that actually legalizing drugs, and doing that in a way that’s informed by racial justice, that grants reparations to people most impacted by the drug war, that also has to happen, too, as we’re talking about all these issues with people dealing with contaminated drugs, people dealing with overdoses when they didn’t even realize what amount they were taking. So I think it’s all of these things together, with a mindset of freedom and supporting people in their survival, a mindset of healing and liberation, instead of the idea that you can confine and surveil and police people into so-called recovery.

    AMY GOODMAN: Maya Schenwar, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Again, this is a conversation we will continue. Maya is editor-in-chief of Truthout. Her sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Maya’s piece about her death is just out. We’ll link to it. It’s headlined “My Sister Died of an Overdose. Defunding the Police Might Have Saved Her.” Maya Schenwar is co-author of Prison by Any Other Name and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

    Next up, we’ll speak with Democratic Congressmember Nikema Williams of Georgia about her Abolition Amendment to end forced prison labor. We’ll also talk with her about voting rights and infrastructure spending. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Proposed changes to policing, surveillance and judicial review will jeopardise right to peaceful protest, says special rapporteur

    Boris Johnson’s government is introducing three pieces of legislation that will make human rights violations more likely to occur and less likely to be sanctioned even as averting climate catastrophe depends on these rights, the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment has said.

    “These three pieces of legislation are shrinking civic space at a time when the global environment crisis demands that people’s voices be heard,” said David Boyd.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • A worker prepares amazon packages in a warehouse

    A coalition of worker advocacy and racial justice organizations marked the start of Prime Day on Monday with an open letter demanding that state and federal lawmakers take action to end Amazon’s systems of employee surveillance, which critics say are at the heart of the company’s devastating injury crisis.

    “Amazon’s business model is a calculated exploitation of workers, the majority of whom are Black and brown,” reads the letter, which was signed by the Athena Coalition, Fight for the Future, and 33 other groups.

    “Amazon’s punishing system monitors workers’ speed or rate, tracks their movements each second with a metric called time off task, and imposes a constant threat of termination,” the letter continues. “Amazon claims to simply monitor workflow — but in reality, rate and time off task is used to control physical movements and discipline workers, dictate when or if they can use the bathroom, and has been used to retaliate against worker organizing.”

    According to a report released earlier this month by the Strategic Organizing Center, Amazon workers sustained more than 24,000 serious injuries last year, an injury rate far higher than at Walmart and other major U.S. employers.

    As the anti-surveillance coalition emphasized in its letter, Prime Day tends to heighten warehouse injury risks as workers face intense pressure to accommodate the influx of orders associated with Amazon’s largest shopping event of the year. Internal Amazon data obtained by Reveal News last year showed that “injury rates have spiked during the weeks of Prime Day and Cyber Monday, contrary to Amazon’s public claims.”

    “Those two weeks had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019,” Reveal reported.

    As Fight for the Future director Evan Greer put it in a statement, “Amazon’s workplace surveillance system is brutal every day, and even worse on Prime Day.”

    “Workers’ bodies are being injured, in some cases permanently, just so boxes can be delivered the same day. It’s absurd,” Greer added. “Amazon knows their system physically harms workers and ruins lives, but refuses to roll back the system that injures workers at such a despicable rate: workplace surveillance… Congress needs to take immediate action to rein in one of our country’s largest and most abusive employers by passing legislation to end workplace surveillance.”

    In their letter on Monday, the 35 groups called on lawmakers and regulators at the state and federal levels to take several specific steps, including:

    • End rate and time off task tracking: State and federal electeds should enact laws that ban surveillance-driven discipline and control to ensure that workers are protected from abusive conditions.
    • Update OSHA standards and enforcement to end rate and time off task: As evidence mounts that Amazon’s model creates an unsafe workplace, state and federal OSHA programs should enforce existing standards and create new rules that address practices like rate and time off task that monitor workers and increase the pace of work.
    • Investigate Amazon’s abuses: Agencies tasked with safeguarding workers should investigate Amazon for these widespread and long-standing abuses, including: injuries, retaliation, and discrimination.

    “Amazon will soon be the largest private employer in the United States, and if lawmakers and regulators fail to take action, its dangerous and extractive model will become the standard in warehousing, logistics, and retail,” the letter warns. “As other retailers implement similarly exploitative strategies, this dangerous trend will further degrade working conditions for tens of millions of people across the country.”

    Read the full letter:

    Amazon injures and discards warehouse workers and delivery drivers at double the industry average. There were a record 24,000 serious injuries at Amazon facilities last year. It is time for lawmakers and regulators to step-in and end the punitive system of constant surveillance that drives the dangerous pace of work at Amazon.

    Amazon’s business model is a calculated exploitation of workers, the majority of whom are Black and brown. Amazon’s punishing system monitors workers’ speed or rate, tracks their movements each second with a metric called time off task, and imposes a constant threat of termination. Amazon claims to simply monitor workflow — but in reality, rate and time off task is used to control physical movements and discipline workers, dictate when or if they can use the bathroom, and has been used to retaliate against worker organizing. A recent investigation in Washington State concluded that this high-pressure system violates the law.

    Discarding workers after they are injured or too exhausted, Amazon churned through over half a million workers in 2019. Amazon’s model breaks people’s bodies, taking their health and sometimes livelihoods. The cumulative costs of this exploitative business model are offloaded onto workers, their families, and the public.

    Black workers disproportionately bear the brunt of Amazon’s model. At one of Amazon’s largest warehouses in New York, Black workers were fifty percent more likely to be fired than their white peers. And during the pandemic, Amazon fired several Black workers who spoke out about unsafe conditions. This mirrors findings that Black people are more likely to have dangerous jobs, less likely to have their concerns heard, and more likely to be retaliated against. Further, Amazon actively discourages the promotion of hourly workers in warehouses, the majority of whom are Black and brown.

    Warehouse workers and delivery drivers cannot wait for Amazon to fix its broken system. To ensure Amazon’s model does not become the standard for our entire economy, regulators and lawmakers must intervene:

    • End rate and time off task tracking: State and federal electeds should enact laws that ban surveillance-driven discipline and control to ensure that workers are protected from abusive conditions.
    • Update OSHA standards and enforcement to end rate and time off task: As evidence mounts that Amazon’s model creates an unsafe workplace, state and federal OSHA programs should enforce existing standards and create new rules that address practices like rate and time off task that monitor workers and increase the pace of work.
    • Investigate Amazon’s abuses: Agencies tasked with safeguarding workers should investigate Amazon for these widespread and long-standing abuses, including: injuries, retaliation, and discrimination.

    For years, workers have spoken out and protested against these conditions. Most recently, in Bessemer, Alabama, Black warehouse workers led a unionization effort, citing the punishing conditions created by Amazon’s system of surveillance, control, and threat of termination.

    Last year, civil society organizations stood with workers and called upon Congress to ban this type of punitive worker surveillance, citing the dangerous impacts on workers’ physical and mental health, potential to undermine workers’ right to organize, and long-term deskilling and wage decline of these jobs.

    Finally forced to admit to ongoing injury problems, Amazon is nevertheless doubling down on its extractive model. In his final letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos stated that Amazon would begin to use artificial intelligence to direct workers from one task to the next. But using technology to maintain absolute control over workers’ tasks and workflow, it will only escalate Amazon’s injury crisis. Decades of research show that when workers do not have autonomy and control at work, they are more likely to be injured and experience mental strain and depression. Later, Amazon announced wellness programs and funding for injury research, but it refuses to do the one thing that would stop widespread injuries: eliminate rate and time off task.

    Amazon will soon be the largest private employer in the United States, and if lawmakers and regulators fail to take action, its dangerous and extractive model will become the standard in warehousing, logistics, and retail. As other retailers implement similarly exploitative strategies, this dangerous trend will further degrade working conditions for tens of millions of people across the country. The result will be a punishing, untenable reality for all working people, and Black and brown people will pay the highest cost.

    We demand lawmakers and regulators do everything in their power to end rate and time off task, ensuring Amazon cannot use this punitive system of surveillance to cycle through entire workforces in communities throughout the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • My, were they delighted!  Politicians across several international jurisdictions beamed with pride that police and security forces had gotten one up on criminals spanning the globe.  It all involved a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, led in conjunction with a number of law enforcement agencies in 16 countries, resulting in more than 800 arrests.  The European Union police agency Europol described it as the “biggest ever law enforcement operation against encrypted communication”.

    The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, and some $48 million in cash, both tangible and digital.

    Operation Trojan Shield arose because of a grand dupe.  It involved recruiting an FBI informant who had developed an adulterated version of the encryption technology platform Anom, to be used on modified cell phones for distribution through a range of organised crime networks.  The platform included a calculator app that relayed all communications sent on the platform back to the FBI.   “You had to know a criminal to get hold of one of these customised phones,” the Australian Federal Police explained. “The phones couldn’t ring or email.   You could only communicate with someone on the same platform.”

    The users were none the wiser.  For three years, material was gathered and examined, comprising 27 million intercepted messages drawn from 12,000 devices.  This month, the authorities could no longer contain their excitement.

    While the criminals in question might well have been mocked for their gullibility, the trumpeting of law enforcement did not seem much better.  A relentless campaign has been waged on end-to-end encryption communication platforms, a war against what policing types call “going dark”.  To add some light to the situation, the agencies pine for the creation of tailored back doors to such communications apps as WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal.

    Few could forget the indignant efforts of the FBI to badger Apple in 2016 to crack the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino shooting suspect.  Apple refused.  The battle moved to the courts.  In what has become something of a pattern, the DOJ subsequently dropped the case by revealing that it had “successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple Inc.”  The DOJ then requested that a court order of February 16 demanding Apple create software with weakened iPhone security settings be vacated.  By refusing to reveal how it had obtained access to the phone, government authorities had thrown down the gauntlet to Apple to identify any glitches.

    In 2020, a number of international politicians with an interest in the home security portfolio released a joint statement claiming to support “strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cyber security.”  A casual glance at the undersigned would suggest this to be markedly disingenuous.  Among them were: Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary; William P. Barr, US Attorney General; Peter Dutton, Australian Minister for Home Affairs.

    Having given nods of approval for encryption as “an existential anchor of trust in the digital world”, the ministers took aim at the various platforms using it.  On this occasion, it was the “challenges to public safety” posed by the use of encryption technology, “including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children.”  (The battle against solid encryption is often waged over the bodies and minds of abused children.)  Industry was urged “to address our concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access.” This would involve companies having to police illegal content and permit “law enforcement to access content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

    Cases like Anom demonstrate that there is seemingly no need for such intrusions, bells of alarm, and warnings about safety.  The police have sufficient powers and means, and more besides.  As with such matters, the danger tends to be closer to home: police zeal; prosecutor’s glee; a hatred of privacy.  Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president at the non-profit Internet Society, is convinced of that fact.  “When law enforcement agencies claim they need companies to build in backdoors to help them gain access to the end-to-end encrypted communications of criminals, examples like Anom show that it’s not the case.”

    John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy makes the same point.  “What this case shows is that global law enforcement is perfectly capable of mobilising a multiyear caper to get around exactly the kinds of problems about encryptions that they’ve been talking about without breaking the encryption of the apps that keep you and [me] private.”

    The Australian wing of the operation had even greater extant powers of access to encrypted messages.  The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 is one of those beastly instruments many law enforcement agencies dream about.  It might also suggest why Australia, a nominally small partner, might have been asked by the FBI to be involved in the first place.  When asked if this was the case, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested that the question be put to US authorities.  For him, the AFP’s hardly impressive technical efforts were to be praised.

    None of this is enough for the Morrison government, which is intent on further pushing the surveillance cart in such proposed laws as the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill).  The former would permit the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to issue a new range of warrants for combating online crime; the latter would create a system by which Australian agencies would be able to access stored telecommunications from identified foreign communication providers in cases where Australia has a bilateral agreement.

    Operation Trojan Shield has again shown that calls for weakened encryption are to be treated with due alarm.  Almost silly in all of this was the fact that the FBI and fellow agencies made it a demonstrable fact, undercutting their very own arguments for a more invasive surveillance system. The next play is bound to come from the criminal networks themselves, who, wounded by this deception, will move towards more conventional encryption technologies. The battle will then come full circle.  In countries such as Australia, where privacy is a withering tree, the encryption debate is a dead letter.

    The post Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Many countries are using these technologies to put people in jail,” Israeli lawyer Eitay Mack told CPJ in a recent video interview. He was describing advanced surveillance capabilities, such as those that CPJ has documented being used to target journalists like Omar Radi and Maati Monjib, who were both jailed in Morocco in 2020. 

    Israeli companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite market equipment to government and law enforcement agencies to fight crime, yet as CPJ has noted, journalists are vulnerable to the same sophisticated tools if they fall into the hands of repressive governments. NSO’s Pegasus spyware can remotely control a cell phone and its contents, while police say they use Cellebrite’s forensics products to extract the contents of devices seized during interrogation, potentially exposing journalists’ colleagues, family members, and sources to monitoring or reprisals.   

    When Mack learns that such technology is being used to commit abuses — against journalists or others — he tries to stop its export by petitioning the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The ministry is essentially in control of the industry, he said, through its marketing and license export regime; Mack petitions the ministry to withdraw the relevant license. 

    His work has had an impact, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz: following Mack’s petitions, Cellebrite said that it would stop sales to Russia and Belarus in March 2021, and in September 2020, said it would not supply the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro despite previous sales to defense and police clients in the country. An Israeli High Court ruling on Mack’s petition to halt the trade of arms to Myanmar in September 2017 was subject to a gag order and hasn’t been disclosed, according to Haaretz.

    CPJ spoke with Mack about his efforts to stop exports of the equipment and bring transparency to an otherwise secretive industry. His answers below have been edited for length and clarity. 

    CPJ sought response to Mack’s remarks from the Defense Ministry, NSO, Cellebrite, and other entities named in the interview. Their replies are detailed below

    How often do you come across journalists affected by surveillance technologies? 

    There’s a lot of public interest if it can be proved [that the equipment was used] against a journalist or an activist. But journalists [often] rely on people on the ground with a Twitter or Facebook account, and these kinds of technologies are enabling mass surveillance. If you’re talking about NSO, their system targets [a specific] person each time. According to the company, the list of targets is a few hundred. If you’re talking about Cellebrite, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee said in 2020 that in the previous year the system was used more than 26,000 times in Russia. You connect 26,000 phones, take the information – you control the population. 

    When you figure out where the technology is going, how do you try and stop it? 

    I file a petition to an Israeli court. My goal is to cancel the export license given by the Ministry of Defense. 

    The international media say a lot about the companies themselves, which is very comfortable for the Ministry of Defense. But companies are like subcontractors. The agreements are made between governments and the Ministry of Defense decides which company [gets] the deal. 

    Even if an Israeli surveillance company wants to cancel services because it got information that the system was being used against journalists or to violate human rights, it wouldn’t be able to, because it would cause a crisis [with a] foreign government. 

    The Ministry of Defense has an information security unit called MALMAB that terrorizes the companies to warn them against leaking, and there are very few people [internally] with security clearance to access the client list. If NSO or another company says, “We are like a normal international company, we have an ethics board with the greatest minds in human rights that can check our work,” [that board doesn’t] have information about what the company is doing. 

    How many companies in Israel export surveillance technology? 

    There’s no way to know, because we only know about the companies you see in the headlines. There is digital forensics, like the company Cellebrite; UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]; then the classic surveillance stories like the NSO Group’s Pegasus or PicSix in Bangladesh or the unknown Israeli company in Vietnam. 

    In 2013 I petitioned the Ministry of Defense to disclose the companies in the defense export register. They [only] gave a few numbers in 2014: there were about 80,000 export licenses and 320,000 marketing licenses. In Israel, there’s a unique marketing license [that companies need to negotiate with] potential clients, then a separate export license… [Through the] marketing license, you are exposing your potential client [to the ministry] which can choose to give this client to another company.

    I can identify rifles in pictures on social media, and depending on the model, I can estimate when it was exported, but surveillance systems aren’t physical. With NSO, we don’t know names of their clients, it’s hard to prove. Even with Cellebrite, [which] physically connects to the mobile phone, I only got to know that it [was being used] in Russia and Venezuela and Belarus because [local] authorities announced it. 

    How is the industry regulated in Israel? 

    They keep changing the bureaucracy to make people like me waste time. In the case of Cellebrite, the Ministry of Economy should approve [civilian clients]. But they told me [its sales to Hong Kong] came under the Ministry of Defense, according to the [Defense Export Control Law] of 2007 governing defense equipment. That law is very problematic, because the only limit is in case of a U.N. Security Council arms embargo, which is very rare. It’s why we are seeing Israeli defense exports around the world.  

    [In February 2021] the Ministry of Defense told me they had transferred approval from the unit for defense exports to the director of the Ministry of Defense, because digital forensics [systems like Cellebrite’s] fell under a 1974 order for encrypted items. That order is much worse than the 2007 law, because it allows the director to award licenses as he sees fit. 

    If two laws apply, why choose the older one? In my opinion, they wanted to widen the discretion [to approve] a company like Cellebrite for political and economic [reasons]. 

    This is what I’m trying to change, to introduce a consideration of human rights and democracy. I don’t think Israeli authorities will do it on their own, and they are used to foreign criticism in international forums. It will only happen with pressure from the Israeli public.

    Why are cases you’re involved in often subject to a gag order? 

    In all petitions on defense exports, the Ministry of Defense asks [the court] for a gag order so that only people who are part of the proceedings are able to know the ruling. [Their] representative is not even ashamed to argue that they want the gag order because they don’t have control of the media. 

    It’s annoying, in 2021, that they need to keep asking. But [a gag order] has no meaning, it’s like a child putting a blanket over its head and saying it’s night. Under defamation law in Israel you can publish information that is part of the legal process, so journalists [can report on the petitions even if they can’t report on the verdict]. And I’m allowed to say whatever I want, just not what happened inside the court. 

    What should be happening internationally to improve regulation of this industry?

    The global framework is already there. We should think about surveillance [the same way we] think about rifles and classic defense exports. Every time we’re talking about sanctions or an arms embargo, we should be talking about surveillance systems.

    There should be more demands about the technology and how it is being used, a lot of details are still unknown. Because of NSO Group’s contradictory responses to the media, we don’t know if they are technically able to dismantle [spyware] if they have knowledge of abuse. 

    With Cellebrite, the problem in a legal scenario – as far as I can tell – is that the system sucks up everything, you can’t [request one] WhatsApp message. Then are [law enforcement] violating a search order, and what do [they] do with all the information? 

    It seems that companies – and this is also problem with the Israeli government – they don’t see anything as a human rights crisis, but when they have a huge PR crisis, they are ready to be more transparent. 

    [Editor’s note: NSO Group has told CPJ that it has used a “kill switch” to shut down its systems in cases of serious misuse, but as CPJ and other groups noted in a public letter to the company in April 2021, the company has been vague about how it terminates relationships with clients. Cellebrite told CPJ that its platform “enables selective extraction of major types of digital sources, preservation, analysis and reporting of evidence to accelerate criminal cases” and that its tools are “designed to limit the analysis to only data that might be relevant to the case.”]

    Cellebrite has attracted scrutiny because it is preparing to go public on the New York stock exchange. Could that trigger a PR crisis?  

    It’s an interesting development [when that happens] because it can bring more normalization to the companies. That could push companies to be more transparent, but I don’t think investors outside Israel understand the risk of being 100% dependent on the Israeli government. If the company can’t get an export license, it’s finished. And investors won’t know what the company is doing. They will read [about] it in the newspaper.     

    Editor’s note: In response to CPJ’s questions about Mark’s remarks, Betty Ilovici, the foreign press advisor of the ministry of defense, said in a statement via email on behalf of the ministry that the Defense Export Controls Agency supervises exports of dual use cyber defense products in line with Israel’s Defense Export Control Law and international regulatory regimes, and with oversight from Israeli courts and the Knesset. “Human rights, policy and security issues are all taken into consideration,” she said, but declined to comment on specific licenses citing ministry policy. The statement did not explicitly address CPJ’s questions about MALMAB or Mack’s characterization of companies as ministry subcontractors.

    The statement also said that Israel “is one of the few countries in the world that require a two-stage licensing process by law. In accordance with the two-stage process, the exporter is required to hold a defense marketing license ahead of any marketing or promotional activity and a defense export license, for the export of any product.”

    NSO Group characterized Mack’s statements as “a complete misunderstanding of how NSO operates,” in a statement emailed to CPJ via the Mercury Public Affairs group, but refused to respond on specific points because CPJ declined to identify the interviewee in advance of publication, per CPJ’s editorial policy. The statement added that NSO investigates credible claims of misuse and shuts down a customer’s system if warranted; its Governance, Risk and Compliance Committee reviews human rights and compliance issues, and “takes every possible step to ensure NSO’s technology is sold only to those who use it as intended — to prevent and investigate terror and serious crime.”

    Cellebrite said its products “can only be used lawfully — either pursuant to a court order or warrant” and “we do not enter into business with customers whose positions or actions we consider inconsistent with our mission to support law enforcement acting in a legal manner,” noting several layers of oversight, including a board. The company could terminate license agreements and block software updates in cases where the technology is used in a manner that does not comply with the company’s values, it said in an emailed statement via the Fusion PR firm.    

    Al-Jazeera reported that in 2018 Bangladesh’s army secretly purchased equipment from the Israeli company PicSix to capture communications from mobile phones. Bangladesh’s foreign minister has denied purchasing interception equipment from Israel, according to that report. PicSix did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment submitted via its website. 

    Haaretz reported in 2018 that Vietnam had purchased an Israeli communications interception system. CPJ called Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security for comment but the line rang unanswered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp/CPJ Consultant Technology Editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The sun sets behind Donald Trump

    From the “Nothing New Under the Sun” files, I bring you a former president whose concern over leaks to the press eventually blew his entire administration straight to hell.

    “President Nixon’s staffers formed the ‘White House Plumbers,’” explains Time, “a secret unit tasked with digging up dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. The Plumbers went on to commit crimes for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, including the Watergate burglaries. Although Nixon denied knowledge of the Plumbers activities, tapes subpoenaed during the Watergate investigation revealed years of political espionage and illegal surveillance. The ‘Smoking Gun’ tape revealed that Nixon was involved in the cover up. On August 8, 1974, Nixon became the only American president to resign the office.’”

    Nothing so dramatic as that is in the offing today; Donald Trump — whose own surveillance program against journalists, Democratic politicians and their families, and even his own lawyer, is roiling Washington, D.C., once again — is already out of office. He has been quacking about getting “reinstated” as president from his funnel hole in New Jersey. Sure, put him back in, and then impeach him a third time. Maybe this one will stick.

    The first reports of Trump’s administration running its own ham-fisted Plumbers operation landed late last week with a rolling boom. “As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members,” reported The New York Times. “One was a minor.”

    The roll call of people affected is a perfect match to another Nixonian throwback, the enemies list. Atop Trump’s effective corollary to Nixon’s list was House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who was a regular target of Trump’s tirades. All told, Apple received subpoenas that covered 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses. A number of the people swept up in this metadata search were not in government, including the aforementioned minor.

    Along with the subpoena came a nondisclosure order which barred Apple from informing its customers that the Justice Department was digging into their data. “The nondisclosure order was extended three times,” reports CNN, “each time for a year, Apple said. When it was not extended for a fourth time, Apple said it informed the affected customers on May 5, 2021.”

    Concurrently, the Trump administration also seized communications data from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post. This revelation landed more than a week ago, tangling the Biden administration up in the mess, because his Justice Department apparently continued this surveillance after Trump left office. The Biden White House has disavowed these activities, and the policy regarding leak investigations over at Justice has been changed.

    The wildest revelation came this weekend, when it was revealed that one of Trump’s targets was his own White House counsel, Doug McGahn. “Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple,” reports the Times.

    The time frame for this is easy enough to recall. Not long after Trump took office, his administration sprang more leaks than a badly wrapped diaper. Nobody in the administration’s lower echelons had the courage to resign in protest over the terrifying things they were seeing — “Anonymous,” your table is ready — but they were more than happy to spray that cheese into the wind for the news media to collect, and collect it they did.

    There were weeks when one could not walk around the block without tripping over 10 heavily sourced news reports about White House shenanigans regarding the southern border, the ceaseless infighting within the administration that was usually inspired by Trump himself, and the administration’s dealings with Russia both before and after the election. The Russia questions, it appears, hit a tender spot with Trump, initially prompting the broad and surreptitious data harvest.

    Fallout from these revelations is just beginning. House Democrats intend to hold hearings on the matter and will subpoena any witnesses who don’t come voluntarily. This includes former Attorney General William Barr, who was running Justice when all of this went down. Barr is trying to put as much daylight as he can between himself and these subpoenas, but that will be challenging.

    In May of 2019, then-Sen. Kamala Harris asked Barr directly if “the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested you open an investigation into anyone?” Barr’s reply was a tap-dancing clinic, but if and when he appears at a hearing on this matter, he will not have many places to hide besides an invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights.

    The House will not be the only entity involved in this investigation. “The Justice Department’s internal watchdog announced Friday that he would review how officials sought the data of reporters, lawmakers and others as part of an aggressive crackdown on leaks during the Trump administration,” reports the Post, “a day after it was revealed the department years ago had secretly obtained the data of two congressmen well known for their criticism of President Donald Trump.”

    For their part, congressional Republicans are putting on their best “What, me worry?” faces as these revelations continue to roll in, and why not? Few of them have paid a price for loyalty to Trump, even now that he is out of office. As far as the public stance of the GOP goes, it’s all blue skies.

    … but I do wonder. At present, the Republican Party has tasked itself to defeat several wildly popular pieces of Democratic legislation, bury the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters under a compost pile of “They were just tourists” excuses even as they block an investigation into the incident, and now this, a scandal straight out of central casting with an eerily familiar historical hook to boot. There are only so many running chainsaws a person can juggle before limbs start getting lopped off.

    “The reason this latest issue is so important is that it appears to show the executive branch of the government wielding presidential power to target the legislative branch,” report’s CNN’s Stephen Collinson, “and the President’s personal political enemies. It would be hard to find a more clear and flagrant abuse of presidential power. This behavior would not only be a perversion of the DOJ’s critical role in ensuring the neutral and apolitical application of justice — a key requirement for a democratic society. It would also mirror the actions of autocrats across the world, many of whom Trump openly admired.”

    The GOP’s worst enemy in this? Trump himself, of course. Does anyone think he will sit quietly while this investigation unfolds daily on the television he watches relentlessly? I would be not at all surprised if at some point he winds up pulling a Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men: Did you order the Code Red? YOU’RE GOD DAMNED RIGHT I DID!

    One of these days — not today or tomorrow, but someday — I have to believe the GOP will be forced to wise up and toss this hot potato back into the pot. They are whistling past the political graveyard now because Trump’s base still has the back of the loyal, but there are not enough voters in that base to make a winning national coalition. As these treacherous stories about the former president continue to pile up, that loyalty may come only to be worth the price of a bus ticket home.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights

    More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process or parliamentary debate.

    The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.

    Related: ‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe’s borders

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Round-the-clock tracking condemned as ‘Trojan horse’ giving government vast surveillance powers that violate human rights

    More than 40 human rights organisations have condemned the Home Office’s introduction of 24-hour GPS monitoring of people on immigration bail in an expansion of surveillance powers that has involved no consultation process or parliamentary debate.

    The new policy marks a shift from using radio frequency monitors (which alert authorities if the wearer leaves an assigned area) to round-the-clock GPS trackers (which track a person’s every move), while also giving the Home Office new powers to collect, store and access this data indefinitely via a private contractor.

    Related: ‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe’s borders

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • New York, June 8, 2021– From Morocco to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are using digital surveillance tools to identify, surveil, and silence dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders. Launched on June 7, 2021, the new MENA Coalition to Combat Digital Surveillance has come together to end the sales of digital surveillance tools to repressive governments in the region, fight for a safe and open internet, defend human rights, and protect human rights defenders, journalists, and internet users from governments’ prying eyes.

    The murder of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, on October 2, 2018, demonstrated both the dangerous consequences of targeted surveillance, and the extent of secrecy and impunity in which authoritarian regimes in the region can obtain and deploy sophisticated and oppressive spyware tools. More than two years later, there has been no real accountability for the government involved, while the NSO Group —whose surveillance tools were allegedly used to target Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi associates living in exile — has continued to implicate itself  in egregious human rights violations in the region and around the world (NSO says its spyware is only licensed to government agencies investigating crime and terrorism, and that the company investigates allegations of misuse.).

    The coalition, co-led by the Gulf Centre for Human Rights and Access Now, welcomes all civil society organizations working to defend freedom of expression, privacy, and fundamental rights to become active members. Collective civil society action including strategic litigation, public campaigns, regional and international advocacy, and documentation of surveillance cases and human rights violations, will be key to eliminating digital surveillance tools and ensuring human rights across MENA.

    The coalition was officially launched during the public session at RightsCon, “Protecting Human Rights Defenders and Activists: Coalition to End the Sales of Surveillance Technology to the MENA Region,” on Monday, June 7.

    Coalition members

    • Access Now
    • ARTICLE19
    • Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
    • Front Line Defenders
    • Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)
    • Human Rights Watch (HRW)
    • Iraqi Network for Social Media (INSM)
    • Jordan Open Source Association (JOSA)
    • Masaar – Technology and Law Community 
    • Red Line for Gulf
    • Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
    • SMEX

    Media contact:

    Bebe Santa-Wood

    Communications Associate

    press@cpj.org


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration, and then the Biden administration, to secretly obtain the email logs of four reporters at the newspaper. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper from even knowing about the request until a federal court lifted it. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one at CNN. Jameel Jaffer, founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, says subpoenas for journalists’ records are “really troubling” because of their potential chilling effect on critical journalism. “It’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government,” he says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

    We turn now to look at a fight over press freedom. The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration — and then the Biden administration — to secretly obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper, including its executive editor, from even knowing about the request. The Times reported on the story Friday after a federal court lifted the gag order. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one, Barbara Starr, at CNN.

    On Saturday, the Justice Department reversed course and announced it’s changing its policy and will no longer force media companies to hand over source information as part of its leak investigations.

    On Sunday, New York Times reporter Adam Goldman appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. His phone records were seized by both the Obama and Trump administrations.

    ADAM GOLDMAN: It’s certainly disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. Some of the same prosecutors who were involved in seizing my phone records earlier this year, and unsuccessfully trying get my emails, were involved in secretly obtaining my phone records in 2013 when I worked at the Associated Press. This office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., has a history of trampling on the First Amendment. So that’s why I wasn’t surprised. They treat the media, they treat newspapers like drug gangs.

    AMY GOODMAN: In late May, President Biden spoke out against the seizing of records from journalists at the very time when The New York Times was still under a gag order. He was questioned by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: [Should the government be] seizing reporters’ phone records and emails? And would you prevent your Justice Department from doing that?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Only yours. But beyond yours, OK, for them, no.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: But honestly.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And we should — absolutely positively, it’s wrong. Simply, simply wrong.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: So you won’t let your Justice Department do that?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I will not let that happen.

    AMY GOODMAN: It was only this weekend that the Justice Department announced they would not do this.

    We’re joined now by Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, previously the deputy legal director at the ACLU.

    Jameel, it’s great to have you back. Can you first respond to what we learned this weekend?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, sure. And thanks for inviting me.

    I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that these kinds of subpoenas are really troubling for a number of reasons. It’s not so much about journalists’ rights; it’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government. And if reporters’ sources are available to the government, then reporters won’t be able to get the information they need in order to write the stories we want them to write. So there’s a real concern that these kinds of subpoenas can have a chilling effect on journalism that is, you know, really necessary, journalism that goes to the ability of the public to hold government officials accountable for their decisions. So, that’s why I think these reports are so disturbing, these reports of Trump administration subpoenas directed at news organizations, intended to uncover the identities of reporters’ sources. And, you know, as your intro noted, we’ve seen now a number of these; just over the last few weeks, a number of these have come to light.

    One sort of background fact that’s important to recognize here is that the Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on this set of issues for 50 years. And the result is that whatever protections journalists have in this context are really a matter of executive grace. They’re a matter of what protections the Justice Department wants to give them, rather than what protections the First Amendment requires. The First Amendment is kind of strangely absent in this context. The relevant set of rules has come, over the last few years, at least, from the attorney general’s guidelines, which were strengthened under President Obama. Attorney General Holder tightened those restrictions — tightened those rules in some ways to make it slightly — not just slightly, more difficult for prosecutors to obtain reporters’ sources, the identities of reporters’ sources.

    But even with that kind of tightening, the Justice Department has found it possible to serve these subpoenas, and not just serve these subpoenas, but this most recent report out of The New York Times involves not just a subpoena intended to obtain reporters’ phone and email records, or subpoenas meant to obtain those records, but a gag order on Times executives that prevented, initially, the Times’s lawyer, David McCraw, from disclosing the fact of the subpoena and court order to other Times officials. And that, I think, is a kind of independent First Amendment problem, not just the subpoena directed — you know, intended to uncover the reporters’ sources, but then a gag order that prevents the Times from sharing that kind of information even within the organization, let alone with the public.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we don’t know if there are — though the Biden Justice Department says they’re not going to engage in these, whether there are any more of these gag orders out there, because people can’t talk about them. And what do you make of — I mean, Goldman and Matt Apuzzo had been — the Justice Department had gone after them both under the Obama administration — they worked for AP, and now they’re working at The New York Times — and him saying, “They treat us like drug gangs. They’re using the same laws”?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that there’s a real risk here that people will come to see journalists as kind of extensions of law enforcement or extensions of the intelligence agencies, and then, you know, would-be sources won’t go to people like Apuzzo or Goldman with information that is crucial for the public to have. So I do think that the concerns are justified.

    I know that President Biden has now said that his administration won’t tolerate these kinds of subpoenas, and the Justice Department has said that it’s going to implement that direction, which is obviously a good thing. You know, what I would say about that, though, just to temper it a little, number one, is, again, it’s really troubling that all of this is a matter of executive grace rather than constitutional law. There should be some set of rules, that is independent of whoever’s in office right now, that limits what kinds of information the Justice Department can get, and when, in these kinds of investigations.

    But the other thing I’d say is just that there are real questions about implementation. You know, the definitions matter. Like, who counts as a journalist? What counts as a leak investigation? The attorney general’s guidelines have historically had exception for foreign intelligence investigations. And that means that subpoenas and court orders served under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or national security letters that are sometimes served on technology companies or telecoms, those are essentially exempt from the attorney general guidelines that were put in place under the Obama administration. So there’s a real question now — you know, great that the Biden administration seems willing to go in a different direction, but I think we should ask some questions about the precise scope of the commitment that the Justice Department has now made.

    AMY GOODMAN: Would it be up to Congress to pass laws?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, well, you know, many states have shield laws that protect journalists when state law enforcement seeks access to their records. There is no federal shield law, so, you know, again, we have no background First Amendment law, or almost no background First Amendment law. There’s a 1972 case, Branzburg v. Hayes, which is the last time the Supreme Court weighed in, in this context. But that case is very, very muddy, sort of notoriously muddy. It doesn’t really give journalists any kind of real confidence that their records can be kept secret. So you’ve got that, and, on the other hand, you have no federal shield law. There’s no congressionally enacted protections for journalists.

    So, again, what that leaves journalists with is really just whatever protections the Justice Department wants to give. And I don’t think that’s really defensible in a society that is committed to press freedom. You know, you can’t call yourself a society that’s committed to press freedom if the only press freedom that exists is the press freedom that the government wants to provide or the executive branch wants to provide.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to shut down all use of the popular video-sharing app TikTok in Israel last month.

    The attempt to censor TikTok, details of which emerged last weekend, is one of a number of reported attempts by Israel to control social media content during last month’s military assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Netanyahu tried to impose the blackout as Israel faced an international social media outcry over its 11-day attack on Gaza, which killed more than 250 Palestinians, and the violent repression by Israeli police of Palestinian protests in occupied East Jerusalem and inside Israel.

    Government law officers are understood to have resisted the move.

    Benny Gantz, the defense minister, also lobbied senior officials at Facebook and TikTok to crack down on posts critical of Israel, labelling them incitement and support for terror.

    The tech giants responded by agreeing to act “quickly and effectively,” according to a statement from Gantz’s office.

    The revelations follow widespread reports last month that social media corporations regularly removed posts that referred to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Israel recently stepped up moves to force out Palestinian families and replace them with Jewish settlers.

    Social media users and digital rights organizations also reported censorship of posts about the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

    Threats of expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah and an invasion by Israeli soldiers of al-Aqsa were the main triggers causing Hamas to fire rockets into Israel last month. Israel responded by destroying swaths of Gaza.

    Shadowy cyber unit

    Israel’s success in manipulating social media last month follows warnings from Israeli human rights groups about the longer-term threat of Israeli censorship faced by Palestinians.

    Adalah, a legal rights group in Israel, said a shadowy Israeli government “cyber unit” – which works hand in hand with tech giants like Facebook and Twitter – had been given “a blank check” to police social media and muzzle online dissent.

    Israel’s supreme court ruled in April that the cyber unit could continue its often secretive operations from inside the justice ministry, arguing that its work contributed to national security.

    Since 2016, the cyber unit has removed many tens – and more likely hundreds – of thousands of Palestinian social media posts in collaboration with global tech corporations.

    The posts are erased without any legal oversight and usually without notifying users, Adalah pointed out. In many cases, users’ accounts are suspended or removed entirely, or access to whole websites blocked.

    The vast bulk of those being silenced are Palestinians – either those under a belligerent Israeli occupation or those who live inside Israel with degraded citizenship.

    The cyber unit was established in late 2015, part of a raft of measures by Israel purportedly intended both to identify “terrorists” before they strike and to curb what Israel describes as “incitement”.

    Given the opaque nature of the process, it is impossible to know what content is being taken down, Rabea Eghbariah, one of the Adalah lawyers who filed a petition against the unit to Israel’s high court, told The Electronic Intifada.

    Examples in the Israeli media, however, suggest that Israel regularly targets posts critical of Israel’s belligerent occupation or express solidarity with Palestinians.

    The court petition to end the cyber unit’s work was filed in November 2019 by Adalah, which represents 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of Israel’s population.

    According to Adalah, the unit’s methods violate “the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process”.

    In approving those methods, Adalah observed, the courts had conferred on the Israeli state the “unchecked” power “to govern online speech” and had allowed private tech companies to usurp control of the judicial process.

    Eghbariah said Palestinians could rarely challenge their silencing on social media. The tech companies do not reveal when Israel is behind the censorship or what “terms of service” have been violated.

    In court, Israeli officials defended their sweeping suppression of online content by arguing that ultimately social media companies like Google and Facebook were free to decide whether to accede to its requests.

    News sites shuttered

    However, Israeli officials have previously boasted that the tech giants almost always agree to remove whatever content Israel demands. In 2016, the justice ministry reported that Facebook and Google were “complying with up to 95 percent of Israeli requests to delete content” – almost all of it Palestinian.

    Eghbariah told The Electronic Intifada that some 80 percent of Israel’s referrals for removing content relate to Facebook and its other major platform, Instagram, both of which are heavily used by Palestinians.

    The next most targeted site was YouTube, where Palestinians often post videos showing attacks by Jewish settlers illegally taking over Palestinian land or Israeli soldiers invading Palestinian communities.

    The accounts of Palestinian news agencies and journalists have also been repeatedly shut down.

    Eghbariah noted that submissions by Israel’s cyber unit to social media platforms had skyrocketed since it was set up. In 2019, the last year for which there are figures, some 19,600 requests to remove content were submitted – an eightfold increase on three years earlier.

    He added that each referral to a tech company could relate to tens or hundreds of posts, and that the removal of a whole website typically counted as a single request.

    “What’s noticeable is the increasing cooperation rate of the social media platforms,” he said. “In 2016, three quarters of Israeli requests were complied with. By 2019 that had risen to 90 per cent.”

    Distinctions blurred

    Human Rights Watch is among those who have criticized Israel for blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism made by Palestinians and incitement.

    By contrast, the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh has noted, Israel rarely takes action against Israeli Jews, even though they are responsible for posting racist or inciteful material roughly every minute.

    And the politicized nature of Israel’s crackdown on social media is often hard to disguise.

    In December 2017, Nariman Tamimi was detained for incitement.

    She had streamed a video on Facebook of her then 16-year-old daughter, Ahed, confronting and slapping an Israeli soldier who was invading their home in the occupied West Bank moments after his unit shot her cousin.

    Dareen Tatour, a poet from the town of Reine, next to Nazareth, spent years either in jail or under strict house arrest for supposedly glorifying violence in a poem.

    Experts said the lines had been misunderstood by Israel’s security services.

    Indeed, errors in translations from Arabic have been regularly evident. In a case in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer was arrested for supposedly threatening a terrorist attack on Facebook before it was discovered that the Arabic expression he used meant “good morning.”

    In 2019, 7amleh reported that fears over this online crackdown had left two-thirds of Palestinians worried about expressing their political views on social media.

    Normalizing censorship

    Other governments may look to the Israeli court’s decision in April as further encouragement to adopt a more aggressive role in censoring online content.

    Eghbariah said that the UK, France and the European Union already had their own cyber referral units, although unlike Israel’s those units were explicitly authorized by legislation.

    In a sign that Israel’s politicized approach to crushing online dissent could become normalized worldwide, an architect of Israel’s cyber unit was appointed to Facebook’s new oversight board last year. Emi Palmor was the justice ministry’s director-general at the time the unit was established.

    The board is supposed to oversee what content should be allowed on Facebook and Instagram.

    The Israeli cyber unit’s increasing efforts to remove content from Palestinians, labelling it “terrorism,” “disinformation” or “incitement,” are the latest stage in more than a decade of moves by Israel to control and manipulate its image online as social media has become more central in most people’s lives.

    Israel stepped up its digital activities after its large-scale attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, which killed large numbers of civilians, including children, and shocked much of the world.

    During the attack, the Israeli army established its own Youtube channel, the first army to do so, offering a model that the US army quickly sought to emulate.

    At the same time tech-savvy youngsters were recruited to pose as ordinary web-surfers as they secretly promoted foreign ministry talking-points.

    Several “cyber warrior” teams established in the following years, including one that recruited former officers from Israel’s military spying unit 8200.

    Erased from maps

    Since then, Israel has expanded its digital operations, not only promoting hasbara (propaganda) online but intensifying its silencing of Palestinians.

    At a conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2018, local representatives for Google and Facebook conceded that the companies’ priority was to avoid upsetting powerful governments like Israel’s that could tighten regulation or constrain their commercial activities.

    The tech giants are also unlikely to be neutral between the claims of the Israeli state and ordinary Palestinians when they are so reliant on Israel’s hi-tech sector. Technologies developed using the West Bank and Gaza as a testing-bed have been eagerly bought up by these global corporations.

    Incensed by Facebook’s censorship, a Palestinian campaign of online protests was launched in 2018 under the hashtag #FBcensorsPalestine.

    In Gaza, demonstrators have accused the company of being “another face of occupation.”

    Google and Apple have also faced a wave of criticism for colluding in Israel’s policy seeking to erase Palestinians’ visible presence in their homeland. The tech companies have failed to identify many Palestinian villages in the West Bank on their online maps and GPS services while highlighting illegal Jewish settlements.

    They have also refused to name the Palestinian territories as “Palestine,” in accordance with Palestine’s recognition by the United Nations, subordinating these areas under the title “Israel.”

    Jerusalem is presented as Israel’s unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims – making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible.

    • First published in Electronic Intifada

    The post Tech giants help Israel muzzle Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Photo Image:  FilmDaily

    Orientation

    My Purpose

    A few months ago, I wrote an article titled “Political and Spiritual Cults“. My purpose was to show the commonalties among all cults, whether they are political, spiritual or psychological. In this article I want to narrow the focus to discuss a left-wing psychological cult, the Sullivanians, a countercultural organization that made its mark on the Upper West Side of New York City between 1970 and the early 1990s. Why bother to do this? Because as a socialist I have to face that any socialist organization I join, whether it be social democratic, Leninist or even anarchist has the potential to become a cult. The more we know about the conditions under which cults emerge, the more we can combat them.

    Overcoming Media Biases Against Cults

    When mass media compares cults members to the general population, cult members are portrayed as:

    • Mentally unstable
    • Less educated
    • Lonelier
    • From the poor and working-class backgrounds
    • Physically intimidated into joining
    • Brainwashed
    • Drawn from criminal elements
    • Less moral as people

    Research has shown none of this to be true.

    Plan of the Article

    For the most part I will be following the architecture I built in my previous article, including what is a totalistic institution; the ten characteristics of cults; the stages cults go through; the mechanisms of control in each stage; why people stay; what kind of qualities the leaders have and what is the impact of leaving on cult members.

    I will be adding a short section on the theoretical assumptions of the Sullivanians at the beginning. For each of these units I will say something about how it applies to the Sullivanians. Besides my article, I will be referring to two books on the Sullivanians: Amy Siskind’s sociological analysis, The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism and a book by a participant, Artie Honan How Did A Smart Guy Like me….For my general understanding of cults, I owe the most to Margret Singer, Janja Lalich, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad.

    Theoretical Assumptions

    The Sullivanian Institute was a spin-off organization that broke away in 1957 from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was sensitive to the social side of psychological dynamics and among other insights blamed the nuclear family for the formation of the ideal capitalist consumer. Both Dr. Jane Pearce and Saul Newton took these criticisms of the nuclear family much further. In 1963, Pearce and Newton coauthored a book called Conditions of Human Growth. In that book they identified the family as socially isolating the individual from developing healthy relationships with friends, especially in adolescence and adulthood.

    Open-ended friendships, both sexual and otherwise, were the way out of the infantilization of the nuclear family and the road to maturity. For them, friendships are the first potential of experience of love between equals. A big part of therapeutic work was to get their patients to expand their friendships as they withdrew from their families. Newton and Pearce considered the desire for the security of exclusive relationships among their patients to be a neurotic symptom. In fact, one of the first things on the agenda of the Sullivanians therapists was to separate the patients from their parents. On the whole the two foundation stones of the Sullivanians community were:

    • To break from their family of origin
    • To have non-monogamous sexual relations among friends

    What is a Totalistic Institution?

    Calling an organization a cult has more to do with how an organization is run than what people believe. Cults are a subcategory of organizations which includes mental health institutions, prisons, army barracks, orphanages, and religious institutions such as monasteries. As opposed to this, in what Erving Goffman calls “pluralistic institutions”, people come and go as they please in and out of various institutions throughout the day as they go from playing one role to another. Within each institution, the group dynamics and power relationships vary. An individual can have great control in one area and little control in another. What produces critical thinking within the individual is the habit, whether conscious or unconscious, of comparing one institution to another, each with their strengths and weaknesses.

    In totalistic social formations, all institutions are rolled into one. Economic exchanges, livelihood, sacred beliefs, political dynamics, living situations and sexual encounters are all concentrated within a single institution. In the more extreme institutions like prisons or in the military, working and play activities are done all at the same time, in the same place with uniform expectations. Boundaries between inside and outside are rigid. The authorities are centralized and there is little room for feedback. There are surveillance systems, spying and little privacy, and this breeds insecurity and paranoia.

    Sullivanians as a Total Institution

    The Sullivanian community was divided into four tiers. The four therapists at the top were Saul Newton, Joan Harvey, Ralph Klein and Helen Moses; a secondary tier of therapists in training; a third tier of psychotherapy patients and lastly, community members who were friends of the people in the first three tiers. When the Sullivanians morphed into the Fourth Wall Theatre community in 1977, the fourth tier were people living in Manhattan who came to see the plays, often from poor areas of the city. The biggest factor that made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution was the collapsed boundaries between the tiers. Members of all tiers were invited to have sex with each other, including therapists with clients, clients and those in therapy training. Sleeping alone was considered an interpersonal failure. Furthermore, the therapists ignored confidentiality and talked openly about the problems of their patients. The most important people – the therapists – knew everyone else’s business and encouraged others to be spies to report on any dissatisfactions anyone had with the leadership. This led to mistrust among people in the second and third tiers as well as paranoia.

    The Sullivanians were not as rigid as a prison or an army barracks. Community members worked at different jobs and they lived in different apartment buildings.  However, all households occupied most of an apartment building and each household apparently consisted only of members of the Sullivanian community. These households made enough money to hire people from the outside to cook, clean and babysit. House members had regular meetings in which they talked about household problems but also about their lives. Members also knew each other’s weaknesses and these weaknesses got back to the leadership in one way or another.

    The dependency of community members on the leadership ran deep. Therapists in training were dependent on leadership economically to provide them with referrals. People were dependent personally for their identity through therapy. Interpersonally they played together, lived together and in the 1980s, did political work together. All this supported the authoritarian control by the leaders and made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution.

    Ten Characteristics of Cults

    From my previous article on cults, I named ten characteristics.

    • It emerged out of a political, economic or ecological crisis.
    • It recruited young adults between 17 and 24 of middle-class and upper middle-class origins who were likely to be undergoing some developmental crisis in their personal lives.
    • It has an authoritarian, charismatic leader.
    • It has a revolutionary, dualistic ideology.
    • It possesses a social-psychological array of tools for luring in new members and sustaining their commitment.
    • It lacks mechanisms for critical feedback from the membership.
    • It requires a small group of lieutenants to isolate and keep atomized the membership through spying so that no coherent opposition can form.
    • It develops rituals, myths and celebrations that allow the group to mark time.
    • It demonizes outside groups that are in competition with the cult.
    • It has rigid, terrorized boundaries that make it extremely difficult to leave.

    Sullivanians’ Characteristics of Cults

    It is not true that the Sullivanians cult emerged as a reaction to a political, economic or ecological crisis. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the economy was not contracting. It was possible for community members to work at low paying jobs in the arts, have leisure time and still make the rent, especially because of group living. However, the decline of the Sullivanians community in the 1980s was definitely connected to contracting economic conditions where rents skyrocketed and jobs in the arts shrank. AIDS and the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island added to the group paranoia.

    The Sullivanians did appeal to upper middle-class adults. They weren’t in any serious psychological crisis. They were relatively healthy adults who were attracted to an alternative lifestyle including art. music, theatre and dance. Sexual exploration was part of the counterculture and not unique to the Sullivanians. In Saul Newton they had an authoritarian working-class leader who was once a member of the Communist Party and claimed to have fought in the Spanish Civil War. Both men and women in the community agreed he was charismatic. Newton was also erratic and explosive and most members were scared of him. There were no institutionalized feedback mechanisms for criticizing the leadership. Complaining behind his back was dangerous because of surveillance and could easily get back to the leaders.

    Although Newton was either a Stalinist or a Maoist, in the first nine years of the community, he was not heavy-handed politically. It was in the descendent phase when the nuclear meltdown occurred, the AIDS epidemic spread and Yankeedom had become more conservative in the 1980s that his Stalinist or Maoist politics became more hard-edged.  Relations between the Sullivanians and other leftists became increasingly hostile, and their political ideology became more dualistic and sectarian. Here is where the characteristic of the demonization of outsiders took place.

    The psychological array of tools for drawing people in and holding them was pretty straightforward. In all cults, sex is used to control people. However, in most cults sex flows one way, from the members to the leaders. Among the Sullivanians sex among members was immediate and expected. Secondly, unlike other cults, women were encouraged to have more than one partner at a time. Besides immediate and sustained sex for both men and women, there was the opportunity to work with therapists on their problems and to do so for a low fee, compared to the much higher going rate. Thirdly, friendships were made quickly and developed through household living arrangements. Fourthly, the Sullivanians were very supportive of the members developing their creativity. Siskind points out that many of them became famous in the arts, filmmaking, and dance. The Sullivanians were also a utopian community, so joining it helped people to feel that they were a special group, superior to others, in addition to being part of a movements which was going to overthrow capitalism.

    Symbolism and ritual were a strong part of the Sullivanians community. They played hard together at parties and vacations, but this was all secular enjoyment. There was no celebration of revolutionary holidays or the singing of the Internationale, as we might expect of an aspiring socialist community. Neither was there a dramatic change of identity based on change of hair or clothes that I found.

    Stages of Cults

    As I said in my article Political and Spiritual Cults:

    In their book, The Guru Papers, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad identify two stages of cults: the proselytizing stage and the apocalyptic paranoia stage.

    In the proselytizing ascendant stage, the guru sees the possibility of realizing his ambitions. The group is touted as being at the cutting edge of new knowledge. Outsiders are welcomed although they are treated with a kind of benign superiority. In the ascendant phase, the guru rewards the enthusiasm of his followers and grants them positions which have opened up within the hierarchy. The tone of the community is celebratory. The guru is accessible to the public and is charming and playful. In terms of the recruitment, this is the “honeymoon phase”. The focus is to expand the organization and the emphasis is on the present.

    The apocalyptic, paranoiac, decadent phase is when the numbers of recruits have leveled off and explanations need to be found. The public is now seen as too stupid and blind to acknowledge the merits of the cult. In the declining stage, the message becomes pessimistic, with a doomsday “I told you so” tone. Outsiders cease to be welcomed in a spirit of satisfying their curiosity. Rather they are seen as enemies out to destroy the organization. Part of the descendent phase also involves the guru making more grandiose claims while promising to invoke occult power. The membership begins to have doubts.

    Sullivanians’ Stages of Cults

    The Sullivanians definitely went through these stages. Siskind, in her sociological analysis of them, calls the proselytizing phase the “Halcyon Years” from 1969-1978. Siskind calls the apocalyptic phase “the Revolutionary period of 1979-1983. Between 1984 and 1992 there was a steep decline in membership. In the first period the emphasis was on the psychology of the individual and their full development, including taking classes and the practice of the arts. The full enjoyment of life through sex, friendship, creativity and community was all supported. They also had a comedy club run by a very talented member, Luba Elman who was also responsible for early theatrical productions which later turned into the Fourth Wall Theatre Company. Between 1970 and 1974 the Sullivanian community grew at a steady rate of 100 new members a year, culminating at a peak of 400 in 1974. Political relations with other leftists had some tension but that did not stop cooperation in large protests.

    There were four shock waves which were scattered across the landscape of the Sullivanian community between 1977 to 1983 that turned it from growing, hopeful community into a more stagnant, paranoid and isolated community. The first was the driving out of Luba Elman as the organizer of the Fourth Wall Repertory Company and her replacement by therapist turned playwright and actress, Joan Harvey. Both she and her partner Saul were dictatorial in their expectations of the members of the stage crew and everyone else in the Fourth Wall community.

    Another very dramatic event was the Fourth Wall takeover of the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. The previous company refused to leave the building although the lease was up. They were forced out in an orchestrated attack, with waves of Fourth Wall people invading the building. Some took over the stage sets, rebuilt them with the carpentry and electrical skills of the Fourth Wall community. Two hours after the initial takeover, 160 more members came to support the takeover and guard the building. Then they set up an elaborate security system to guard the building. The violent nature of the whole process must have affected the moral of people. Artie Honan, one of the chief organizers of the takeover, said: ”Looking back, I feel that this was a senseless act of violence. Something I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been taking direction from Saul. (What’s a Smart Guy Like Me…) I doubt he was alone in these sentiments. Later he said I was preoccupied about having to organize security coverages …I had no time to reflect on the experience or to think about how it ran against the grain of my values. Lack of time to think is characteristic of all cults.

    A third major event was the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. This spread fear in the community. It led to a panic in which 200 community members en masse fled to Florida to avoid radiation. This event turned the Sullivanians into an explicitly political community as Saul’s Maoist orientation came to the fore. House meetings went from every day discussions about household and personal problems to political book readings and discussion groups. It was in this period that Saul implemented a Maoism anti-intellectual campaign in which community members would renounce their class background in group self-confession circles.

    A fourth major event was the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. This directly impacted the size of the community and the sex-economy of the organization. The Fourth Wallers were naturally wary of having sex with outsiders and limited the sexual activity to the already existing members. Since, on average, the women outnumbered the men two to one, the shortage affected the women more than the men. There was even a Male Chauvinism campaign within the community to force the men to have sex with women who didn’t have partners! Please see Table A for a contrast between the two stages within the Sullivan community

    Characteristics of Sociopathic Leaders

    In their book Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias identify fifteen characteristics of a sociopath that could apply to a cult leader. Here they are:

    • Glibness and superficial charm
    • Conning and maneuvering
    • Grandiose sense of self
    • Pathological lying
    • Lack of remorse, shame or guilt
    • Shallow emotions
    • Incapacity to love
    • Sensation seeking
    • Impulsivity and lack of behavioral control
    • Early behavior problems with juvenile delinquency
    • Scapegoating
    • Promiscuous sexual behavior and infidelity
    • Erratic work history of fits and starts
    • Materialistic lifestyle
    • Criminal and entrepreneurial versatility

    Saul Newton as a Sociopath

    As repulsive as Saul Newton might be to you and to me, he did not have all fifteen characteristics of a sociopath. I will begin by eliminating the characteristics he did not possess. We know very little of his history, so we don’t know anything about whether his teenage behavior might be categorized as juvenile delinquency or whether he had an erratic work history. From my reading I did not find instances of sensation-seeking. He put members in the Sullivanians community in risky situations, but he seemed to be sure that he and any of his wives were well-protected. It would be unfair to characterize him as having shallow emotions. He had problems controlling his anger, as in beating his wives. There is nothing I’ve read that indicated that Newton showed any deep emotion but anger. It is reasonable to say he was emotionally repressed, rather than being shallow.

    Criminal and entrepreneurial creativity in cults usually means if one cult group fails and goes bankrupt, the leader wheels and deals and repackages himself with a new name and organization as Werner Erhard did. As far as I know, Saul Newton did not do this. He stuck with the Sullivanian community all his life. Lastly, a “materialistic lifestyle” is a very vague term. How many cars, boats, planes and houses does a leader have to possess to qualify as being materialistic? From my reading, I would classify Newton as upper middle-class, akin to a doctor, lawyer or architect living on the Upper West Side of New York City. He and his wives had their own chefs, childcare providers and shoppers. He owned a brownstone building. Newton lived well, but he didn’t have seven Cadillacs, as Rajneesh had. He did not own any boats or planes, nor did he buy other buildings and deal in real estate. He did not have the lifestyle of L. Ron Hubbard, Reverend Moon or Werner Erhard.

    However, Newton had all the remaining characteristics of a sociopath big-time. He had superficial charm, and as I said earlier, both men and women characterized him as charismatic. He clearly was conning and manipulating the community all his life. He got them to take over a theatre building, told them who could and couldn’t date and set up an elaborate surveillance system for tracking people while convincing the members to do all the work. He maneuvered with Joan Harvey to oust Luba Elman from the Fourth Wall community and put themselves in the leadership position. He seemed to be a pathological liar, meaning he lied so much he lost track of the boundaries between truth and falsehood. There is no indication in either of the books I read that he has the slightest regret or remorse for anything he did. Neither were there any examples in which Newton claimed to love anyone. He was not loved by community members, but feared. In a small funeral gathering in 1992 not a single member of the Sullivan community showed up.

    Newton definably had a grandiose sense of himself. What kind of person would have put himself at the head of a psychotherapy organization with no degree in the field or even having been in therapy himself? He was almost compulsively promiscuous. He had no problem asking his female patients for sex as part of the sessions. At the end of his life when he was suffering from dementia, he continued to see clients even when his memory was failing him. Newton was clearly impulsive (at least around getting angry) and could not control himself. However, in other situations he was extremely deliberative as he plotted and schemed to manipulate community members. Lastly, he was always blaming community members when things didn’t go right. He showed no power of self-reflection in seeing how his behavior was partly responsible for anything.

    Reasons People Stayed in the Community

    Why do People Stay?

    Lalich and Tobias lay down the following most common reasons people stay in cults:

    • Attachment to new beliefs
    • Cognitive dissonance
    • Entrapment
    • Peer pressure
    • Exhaustion from overwork allows little time for objectivity or self-reflection
    • Burned bridges separate members from their past
    • Being ridiculed and called names by cult members is very painful
    • Fear for your life
    • Guilt and embarrassment over having participated in the group to begin with

    From the two books I’ve read about the Sullivanians, I would say virtually every one of these psychological conditions were operating. In the early years, the major belief centered around a conviction that their nuclear family was the major part of their problems. Giving up their belief would mean facing they were dupes who then burned their bridges and hurt their families badly. It would definitely cause cognitive dissonance. Community members were clearly entrapped. Most spend anywhere between 5 and 20 years in the community, forging deep friendships. They spent hundreds of hours in therapy and in the last years of the community, that was not cheap. For many, their livelihoods were dependent on the community and their living situations were all tied together. It is completely understandable they would not want to cut their losses.

    There was a great deal of peer pressure to stay in the group. It was difficult to think clearly about whether or not to leave when they could not easily discuss openly their reservations about staying. They could never be sure if what they said would get back to the leadership. In addition, by the early 1980s, the economy was contracting, requiring members to work longer. Also, Newton was becoming increasingly demanding of members to be available for work on the Fourth Wall community. As Artie Honan says many times in his autobiography, there was little time to reflect on the big picture. Most were like frogs in slowly boiling water. They couldn’t see what was happening to them.

    Unlike other leftist cults, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of name calling, but Saul Newton was brutal about getting rid of any community member he felt was too much trouble and, perhaps more painfully, community members executed his wishes. People were kicked out of the community quickly, often told they had 24 hours to leave their group housing situations. In at least one instance a person’s things were thrown in the street. Ex-members were shunned and ignored in public and the Upper West Side of New York is not a place to easily find anonymity.

    Saul Newton was a violent man. He beat his wives and occasionally publicly punched a few of the men in the community. The violence he used in orchestrating the takeover of the theatre was probably never forgotten by anyone. When one of Saul’s psychological proteges decided to leave, upon Newton’s instruction he was followed, grabbed from behind and held over the subway tracks.

    If members decided to leave, they had little in the way of a support system. Their families were heart-broken, angry and some members were disowned. The road back was unknown, lonely and full of doubt. There was no recovery groups from cult in those days. I don’t really know that the Sullivanian community felt a sense of guilt upon leaving the way members of other cults might. If a member got into the cult early, in the good days of the first seven years, those memories must have been breath-taking, intense and not easily forgettable compared to whatever normal life followed. It was the period from the early 1980s on they might have felt regretful about.

    Aftermath for Cult Members

    In their book Cults in Our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich identify five major areas of life ex-cult members have to deal with:

    • Practical everyday life
    • Emotional volitivity
    • Cognitive inefficiencies
    • Theoretical instabilities
    • Lack of a social network

    How Ex- Sullivanians Members Managed Their Lives in The Aftermath

    Practical, everyday life

    The two books I read on this subject do not have much information about how group members managed after the community broke up. Most of what follows will be what I would call reasonable speculation. In the area of everyday living, I believe the Sullivanians did better than ex-members of other cults. For example, Sullivanians had to find work to support themselves while in the cult and they succeeded in landing jobs in the arts or doing technical work. While ex-members who became therapists were dependent on referrals, this was not a community that was totally dependent economically. The same was true about managing money and finding an apartment. Members had practice in doing these things even when in the cult. While the Sullivanians were not provided with their own medical and health care, as upper middle-class urbanites they would not go without health and medical care as many members of other cults did. All this doesn’t mean they did not suffer. But compared to other cults, the climb back up might not have been as steep.

    Emotional volatility

    In terms of emotional volatility, I suspect the Sullivanians were more like other cults in that members suffered from PTSD, insomnia and dissociation at times. I don’t think difficulty concentrating or flashbacks were part of the psychological processes they had to constantly fight off because there were not that many bad experiences. I don’t believe a loss of a sense of humor was a psychological condition. Membership in households provided opportunity for play and laughter. It wouldn’t take much to bring them back. Depression over loss of the Sullivanian community and its vision must have been great. Before the community as a whole broke up, Saul‘s treatment of those who left would give them every reason to fear for themselves and their loved ones.

    Cognitive inefficiencies

    Many members of other cults have trouble thinking critically when they leave. Especially in spiritual cults which place a great deal of emphasis on meditation, and other altered states of consciousness, where critical thinking is frowned upon. Some young members of cults never learned to think critically. They simply did not know how to set up spread sheets for weighing the pros and cons of different job offers, school choices or romantic partners. After being in cults which for years explained causes and consequences by good and evil forces, it is difficult to reason about complex causes and intended and unintended consequences. I don’t think members of the Sullivanian community ran into these problems much. While they suspended judgment and criticality when under the spell of the leadership, they had to make analytical and comparative judgment while at work, with their partners and at house meetings when they were away from the leadership.

    However, there is one area of cognition which must have been difficult and that is de-toxifying their vocabulary. All cults control their members thinking by narrowing the complexity of their language. When the leaders train someone’s vocabulary to use virtue and vice words, they are training them in dualistic thinking. Dualistic thinking makes people more controllable. This definitely went on in the Sullivanian community. It would take time to reintroduce previously “banned” vice words and repressed virtue words.

    Theoretical instabilities

    The overwhelming majority of cults are spin-offs from major theoretical schools in the fields of spirituality, politics or psychology. Spiritual cults might be spinoffs from Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity. Political cults may draw from the work of Marx or Lenin. Psychological cults may have drawn from Freud, Jung or Humanistic psychology of Maslow. Upon leaving the cult, the ex-cult member is in a theoretical no-man’s-land. Does the psychological cult member whose leader drew from Freud therefore reject Freud completely or are they able to separate Freud from the cult interpretation of Freud? In the case of spirituality, can a member of the Hindu cult like the Hari Krishna’s reject the cult but hang on to Hinduism? In the case of the Sullivanians, Saul Newton was probably a Maoist. Can ex- Sullivanians separate Maoism as practiced by the Sullivanians from Maoist groups in general? Will they remain Leninists and switch from Mao to Stalin? Will they remain Leninists and become Trotskyists? Will they become democratic socialists?

    A more extreme strategy is to reject the field entirely. So, a follower of a spiritual cult may become an atheist. A member of a political cult might become anti-political or apolitical. A member of a psychology cult might join a group that is anti-psychological, such as Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who led the movement against his own field. This may be a good choice because you are starting from scratch. This may also be a bad choice because you are starting from scratch with no infrastructure. There are no easy answers.

    Lack of a social network

    As I mentioned earlier, leaving a cult is devastating for a support system. Most cult members have burned bridges with their family and friends, church and clubs they were once a part of. However, relative to other cults, with the Sullivanians the situation may have been different. I can imagine that anybody who left the cult in the early 1980s when the community was still functioning well would have a rough time. However, once the community itself was disbanded, it was a different story. Why? Because the members of this cult had lived together for years unsupervised directly by the leadership. They played together, they made art together and they made love together, hard and often. These types of connections are easy to remember and hard to forget. Artie Honan says he is still Facebook friends with many former members. He also reports that in 2007, they had a reunion in Harlem. One hundred and fifty people came. Considering the Sullivanians peaked in membership in 1974 at 400, this turnout shows there is something of quality in this community that superseded Saul Newton and the rest of the cult leadership.

    How the Sullivanians Compared to the Experience of Other Cults

    I have a number of reasons for suspecting that the Sullivanians had it better than other cults. In the first place, they did not emerge out of an ecological, economic or political crisis. Neither did they come into the cult at an impressionable age of late teens or early twenties. My sense is that most members were in their mid to late 20s when they joined and were probably more grounded. That meant people were less desperate when they joined the group. Secondly, unlike most, if not all cults, the sexual economy was far more horizontal. Members slept with each other, not just with the leadership, as in other cults. Thirdly, women were as sexually free as the men. Though Saul Newton was definitely patriarchal, women still had many sexual relationships with their peers, just as the men did. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, the social networks that were built had relative autonomy from the leadership, especially in the living situations. This allowed them to form subgroups with their own experiences, independently of the leadership. In most cults, subgroups are not allowed to form. It was these experiences in subgroups that made it possible not to lose complete touch with each other after the Sullivanians broke up as an institution. It made it possible to have a reunion 15 years later.

    The Socialist Political Spectrum: Which Tendencies are Most Likely to Form Cults

    So, what does the fate of the Sullivanians tell us (if anything) about which tendencies on the political spectrum are likely to form cults? Are Leninists, democratic socialists and anarchists all equally likely to form cults or are some more likely to form than others? Remember earlier I said that the key element in determining a cult is not the beliefs but rather how the cult was organized. In addition, charisma, by itself is not enough to institutionalize a cult.

    A good example of a socialist organizer who was charismatic but never turned his group into a cult was Murray Bookchin. I met Murray 50 years ago on the lower East Side of Manhattan and I can testify that he had a great deal of charisma and a significant following among young hippie anarchists. This continued as he moved to Vermont to teach and founded the Institute for Social Ecology.  But the Institute for Social Ecology or any other organization he was involved in did not became a cult because the egalitarian principles of anarchism blocked this from happening.

    It would be unfair to characterize the Sullivanians as a pure political group. It was not a real political group until the 1980s. Yet the leader of the organization, Saul Newton, was a Maoist and during the last years of the group, he did use Maoist tactics like self-confession of the members’ class backgrounds, along with criticism and self-criticism.  In my previous article, a major focus was on a group called the Democratic Workers Party which definitely was a cult with a Leninist focus. What about other Leninists groups?

    In their hostile analysis of Leninist organization, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth identify five other Leninist groups that were either cults or might have at least cultlike characterhoods. Harvey Jackins’ Reevaluation Counseling and Fred Newman’s New Alliance Party and social therapy, Gerry Healy; Ted Grant and Gino Perente also led organizations that had cult-like characteristics which were either Stalinist or Trotskyist in orientation. Each received a chapter’s attention in the book On the Edge.

    Tourish and Wohlforth summarize their book:

    Each and every Marxist Leninist grouping has exhibited the same cultic symptoms: Authoritarianism, conformity, ideological rigidity, fetishistic dwelling on apocalyptic fantasies. Not all Leninist groups are full-blown cults. However, we have yet to discover one that did not have some cultic features (213).

    As Lenin spelled out in 1910 in What is to Be Done, socialist ideas were to be introduced to the working class from the outside by professional revolutionaries drawn largely from the middle class. They view themselves as a chosen people, the possessor of a gnosis beyond the grasp of ordinary folk. Therefore, a separate organization is in order, tight discipline is required and superhuman sacrifice is demanded from members. Democratic centralism is required so that all members publicly defend the agreed positions of the party, whenever opinions they might hold to the contrary in private. (214) The communist front organization is particularly suited to political cult-manipulation (216).

    In contrast to this, the organization of the Democratic Socialists of America has loosely associated chapters and the whole organization is opposed to any kind of authoritarian organization. In fact, they organized themselves intentionally so they would have no resemblance to Leninism.

    Qualification

    I do not mean to imply that Leninism is not successful as a political tendency in the world. Russia, China and Cuba have all offered working class people significant improvements in their lives by way of steady employment, good wages, safe and reasonably priced housing, free healthcare and literacy over the last 100 years. With the exception of Sweden between the 1930s and the 1970s, social democracy has not had a good track record with the poor and working class. As for anarchism, it certainly had a great deal of success in revolutionary movements in Russia, Spain and recently in Rojava. The problem with the anarchists is that it is harder to tell what successes have carried over after the revolutionary period ended.

    The issue in this article, however, is not how successful each of the three socialist tendencies are in the end. Which group is most likely to use cult-like methods to get there? It is clear to me that Leninism has the most cult-like potential according to the criteria in this article.

    • First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults: Sullivanians from Hedonism to Group Terror first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Life is full of slips.

    Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

    Slips are double-edged.

    It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.  Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.”  Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

    Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

    In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide.  They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations.  This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior.  Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories.  It is not just words that have etymologies.

    When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today.  Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown.  It slips in when people are asleep.

    John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

    Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

    And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control.  For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life.  This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines.  A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign.  In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

    … the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual.  The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything.  Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

    Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively.  Ellul again:

    It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).  Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

    The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds.  This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

    In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses.  This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness.  To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

    Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.”  First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem.  A slippery slope indeed.

    But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare.  It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

    In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum.  I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously.  The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality.  Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it.  And it will.  But don’t say this out loud.

    So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

    So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

    A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility.  Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion.  Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

    The other day I was going grocery shopping.  My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.”  Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred.  “I prefer whipping,” she said.

    I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

    We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she.  She slipped, and I found humor in that.  Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

    But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

    It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things.  Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them.  Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

    Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down.  In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies.  We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

    It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many.  A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

    But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate.  To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society.  Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

    So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

    This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

    I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

    We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells.  Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television.  Close the computer.  Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others.  Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away.  Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe.  Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly.  Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite.  Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow.  It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing.  In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

    It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

    I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us.  But without it we are lost.  Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought.  Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.”  Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset.  If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation.  Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

    There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks.  It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness.  Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

    It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.

    The post The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Incarcerated people make one of their daily allotment of six phone calls at the York Community Reintegration Center on May 24, 2016, in Niantic, Connecticut. In nearly all jails around the country, phone calls are recorded and surveilled.

    Mass public surveillance is becoming a threat in everyday life, with big tech corporations digitally tracking our every move. For incarcerated people, surveillance is even more intrusive.

    In the last year, the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) illegally recorded more than 1,500 privileged calls between people incarcerated in its jails and their attorneys. Many of these illegal recordings were turned over to prosecutors.

    This blatant constitutional violation has critical and disproportionate impacts. Three-quarters of people incarcerated in New York City jails are awaiting trial and many are held solely because they cannot afford bail. More than 90 percent are Black and Brown, thanks to discriminatory police and prosecution practices and the fact that the U.S.’s criminal legal system is constructed on a foundation of white supremacy.

    Behind these illegal recordings looms a scandal-plagued surveillance-tech-company-turned-DOC-phone-service-provider: Securus Technologies. The city’s contract with Securus expired on March 31. Yet, despite this scandal and the many others plaguing the vendor nationwide, the DOC quietly extended its relationship with Securus for another year.

    The city’s decision to do so highlights the threat our ballooning surveillance apparatus poses to New Yorkers’ civil liberties and rights. A critical first step to ensure that neither our privacy nor our dignity are for sale would be to end the universal recording of jail calls.

    As a public defender, I am intimately aware of the crushing isolation that comes with being charged with criminal wrongdoing and caged on a remote island. Cut off from support structures, separated from loved ones and subjected to intense situational stress, New Yorkers who are detained in city jails rely on phone calls to stay in contact with their spouses, children and other loved ones. The phone is the singular lifeline for solace, counsel and advice.

    But phone calls — free of charge since 2019 thanks to local advocacy — come at a dehumanizing and devastating cost: the sacrifice of privacy, intimacy and dignity. Every call made to a spouse, parent or child is recorded. There are no exceptions: not for calls to ask your mother for advice on your case; not for calls to talk through your spouse’s medical test results; not for calls to receive news that a younger sibling has passed. Every call is recorded.

    It is easy to imagine that jail calls have always been recorded and that this type of dehumanizing surveillance is essential to public safety. Neither is true.

    For decades, when law enforcement suspected that someone was a jail security threat or planning a crime, they had to apply for an eavesdropping warrant with the requisite evidence. However flawed the eavesdropping warrant regime is, there at least were oversight mechanisms under this system. The warrant requirement for call recording in New York City jails was blanketly eliminated in 2008 — at a time when the city’s crime rates were low and declining — with a simple administrative rule change by the Board of Correction. Their primary justification? “Everyone else is doing it.”

    This rule change opened the door for today’s universal recording practice, which solidifies the biased impact of surveillance: Those who cannot afford bail also cannot afford their right against self-incrimination.

    Years later, in 2014, Securus doubled down on privacy invasion when it began “voice printing” everyone in DOC custody. Simply put, a voice print is a visual representation of an individual’s speech pattern. A biometric (like finger and faceprints), voice prints are used to attempt to identify participants in call recordings. Not only was Securus voice printing incarcerated people, but the company also began tagging and tracking the voice of anyone receiving a call from a New York City jail. Those voice prints along with the call recordings — to the tune of 30,000 per day — are saved to Securus’s databases. With data being today’s most lucrative commodity, Securus is creating a new product line out of the voices of my clients, their loved ones and myself.

    The revelation that Securus has been illegally recording phone calls between people incarcerated on Rikers Island and their attorneys is just the latest in a long line of public scandals involving the company. For illegally recording privileged calls alone, Securus has been sued across the country, from California to Texas, and from Kansas to Maine.

    New York City must terminate its contract with Securus. Sadly though, the problem is not limited to just one spy-tech vendor. Many of the same concerns are raised by the city’s relationship with other corporations like Vigilant Solutions, Dataminr, Palantir and Clearview AI. The recording of jail calls is one example of the city’s misguided investment in covert surveillance programs, which include the monitoring of New Yorkers’ movements, social media activity and other highly personal information.

    These surveillance activities impact not only the specific targets of the surveillance, but also their families, friends and communities. New York must dismantle its biased mass surveillance project. Eliminating universal jail call recording is a good first step.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • NHS mental health services already have worrying ties to the police. And now, damning new information has come to light. Counter-terror police have been working with community mental health teams in so-called ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’. Mental health patients who are also considered at risk of potential ‘extremism’ are referred to the police. The police then follow up and monitor said individuals.

    As part of the Investigations Unit’s #ResistBigBrother series, we’ve looked at the growing criminalisation of Muslims under counter-terror strategies. Now, we turn to police exploitation of mental health services for surveillance strategies.

    What are these ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’?

    Medact, a non-profit, has uncovered information on these hubs through a freedom of information request. Its report found that these hubs have assessed thousands of people. While a pilot version of the hubs ran during 2016-2017, they’re now being rolled out under the name Project Cicero.

    Medact found that:

    Most of the individuals assessed at the hubs are people who have been referred to Prevent whom the police suspect may have mental health conditions.

    These individuals have mental health assessments carried out in the presence of police. The police subsequently remain involved in the patients’ care.

    Medact research manager Hilary Aked summarised:

    It is very clear from explicit statements in the documents that we obtained that police are asking health workers to surveil patients. They use the word monitoring; they talk about the need to establish what they call tripwires, which essentially means that something would trigger the referral if certain behaviours or certain speech is done by the patient. And that’s something which counter-terrorism police advise health workers to be aware of. So there they are performing a surveillance duty for the police.

    In these Vulnerability Support Hubs, mental health workers:

    • Determine if individuals are at risk of being a terrorist in the future.
    • Monitor patients’ speech and behaviours for signs of radicalisation.
    • Engage in apparent programmes of ‘deradicalisation’.

    These policies are all in line with the Home Office’s Prevent programme, which itself works on the idea of ‘pre-crime.’

    Lack of transparency

    The problem of consent rears its head here. Aked explains:

    People are referred to Prevent, you know, often without their knowledge and without their consent. And from there, we think they may be referred to a Vulnerability Support Hub, without their knowledge or consent.

    Indeed, the report states that:

    the data shows that Muslims are disproportionately referred to the hubs, again in line with the wider Prevent programme.

    It’s plain that the Vulnerability Support Hubs target Muslims. They also further complicate the problem of the standard of care Muslim mental health patients receive. Care that should be free from racist assumptions and prioritise patient confidentiality and safety.

    National security

    The Canary reached out to the Department for Health and Social Care for its view on this new information. The department responded:

    Healthcare practitioners recognise Prevent as part of their safeguarding duties and with over 300,000 patient contacts every day, the NHS has an important role to play in preventing vulnerable people from being drawn into terrorism.

    A key part of Prevent is to enable frontline staff to recognise and safeguard individuals at risk from all types of radicalisation, referring them to pathways for appropriate support.

    When we discuss ‘safeguarding’ in relation to counter-terrorism, however, it isn’t about safeguarding at all. It becomes an issue of national security. And another concern is the lack of transparency around national security strategies.

    Aked explained to us:

    Often national security is used as a reason for blanket lack of transparency on issues that need to be in the public eye and need to be publicly debated. That secrecy can provide a cover for problematic practices and a lack of accountability. And I think that’s what’s going on with these hubs.

    Medact struggled to get information on what the hubs are and how they work:

    Their activities have largely remained shrouded in secrecy, with very limited information publicly available. Therefore, the hubs’ work has been subject to almost no scrutiny from the media, scholars or the public. This lack of transparency is itself a major ethical concern since it severely limits possibilities for proper accountability

    What does this ask of mental health workers?

    Another severe implication of Prevent involvement in mental health support is the boundaries it asks mental health workers to cross. Under this model, NHS professionals would have to determine what may trigger a referral to Prevent. Again, the problem is that Prevent operates on a pre-crime basis. That means it targets, and potentially criminalises, people who may commit a crime but haven’t yet done so.

    Aked told us about their hope that mental health workers would push back against this added pressure:

    I think we would hope that health workers would be… pushing back against the further integration of security professionals, because the police’s fundamental mission is very different to that of healthcare. We don’t think any good comes from muddying the waters there between those two very different kinds of missions.

    Aked also made it clear that this added burden for mental health workers is rather beyond their capacity and remit:

    …we think they’ve been put in a really unacceptable position by government, which is essentially trying to corrupt health workers and make them an arm of the surveillance state…obviously, health workers, do share information if there’s a legitimate public interest, or some immediate threat of harm. But when we’re talking about pre-crime the thresholds for sharing information are not there.

    Breeding suspicion based on racism

    Moreover, there’s one fundamental issue with the Vulnerability Support Hubs. It’s that they rely on understandings of terrorism, extremism, and counter-terror that have a history of inaccuracy and racism:

    Often the concerns of counter-terrorism police are quite spurious, very racialised, and that’s another reason these Vulnerability Support Hubs seem to have been created is that they actually just help police access health information.

    In other words, Prevent’s pre-crime remit alone did not allow police to access information on individuals suspected of terrorism. But with the existence of these hubs, police now have access to patients’ private information.

    The hubs are a way for Prevent to continue to spy on Muslims who are assessed as being pre-crime. Aked and Medact’s aim is to call attention to the problems of Prevent’s entanglement with mental health. This involves changing government policy, asking mental health workers to resist, and calling on professional bodies to review the measures.

    Our recent investigation into Serenity Integrated Mentoring (SIM) bears many similarities here. SIM also provides an avenue for police involvement in mental health care. Evidently, such pressure is much needed.

    Aked explains:

    We think these hubs should be shut down. There’s wider problems of racism and coercion in mental healthcare already. Shutting these hubs is not going to solve those problems overnight, but these hubs really encapsulate some of the worst dynamics of both racism in mental healthcare and the racism and securitisation of Prevent policy.

    Community response

    A number of Muslim organisations have expressed their concern at the existence of these hubs.

    Deputy chair of MEND Shazad Amin said:

    ‘Monitoring’ of patients referred for ‘Islamic ideology’ risks pathologising normative Muslim practices.

    The disproportionate rates of Muslim children being referred is also concerning – we need clarity on the reasons for this to ensure that judgements based on Islamophobia are not being made.

    CAGE spokesperson Anas Mustapha told The Canary:

    Medact’s report continues to evidence what has been a worrying trajectory of securitising public health through the instrumentalising of PREVENT. We support Medact’s recommendation on the immediate scrapping of the Vulnerability Support Hubs and go further to demand the complete severing of the toxic PREVENT agenda from public health.

    We’ve documented how PREVENT will irreparably damage doctor-patient confidentiality, and undermine the trust under which all public sector interactions rely upon.

    Making public sector workers the handmaidens of the state, not only erodes that trust but has made no tangible improvement to national security.

    Blurring the boundaries of mental health care to allow police to monitor patients is an egregious abuse of police powers. It severely hampers the standard of treatment available to patients, places Muslims under suspicion, and puts more pressure on an already inadequate mental health service.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Lianhao Qu

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Some methods have been ruled unlawful, but the government is still seeking to expand its powers

    No matter our background or beliefs, we all want control over our personal information, our private views and our sensitive data. That control is key to our autonomy and our liberty. But in 2013 Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on how governments had used the excuse of the “war on terror” to erode that liberty.

    Related: Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen | Lauren Bridges

    Megan Goulding is a lawyer at Liberty, who works on technology and human rights

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City, visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, art and the wonder of comradeship.

    The post Art Against Drones appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • People attend the first Friday prayers of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 16, 2021. Makram El-Amin called for justice for those that were lost to police violence in the Friday sermon.

    Like many Muslims, I remember feeling excited as a child each year when Ramadan came around. Though I didn’t entirely understand the purpose of fasting, I was proud of being Muslim and was eager to emulate my parents. Since I began fasting in second grade, Ramadan has been a core part of my practice of Islam.

    While there is great diversity among Muslims around the globe, the holy month of Ramadan has the power of uniting the entire Ummah (the Arabic word for Muslim community) in a collective observance of fasting and prayer each year. It is this solidarity in worship of Allah that is so evocative of the hadith — the traditions and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), in which he said: “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When any part of the body suffers, the rest of the body comes to its defense.”

    In the current climate of globe-spanning Islamophobia and Muslim suffering, however, acting as one body has become difficult if not impossible. The omnipresent lens of national security subjects our entire faith community to state surveillance, harassment and dehumanizing discourse in media, making it even more difficult for Muslims to reach across existing barriers of race, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic differences.

    A recent Vox article titled “9 questions about the Muslim holy month you were too embarrassed to ask” offered answers to questions about the meaning of Ramadan, how Muslims fast and how to be supportive of a friend who is fasting. The final question, however, was, “So if you’re not supposed to get angry or complain or gossip during Ramadan, how come terrorist attacks by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda always seem to spike during Ramadan?” The Vox author’s tongue-in-cheek response was “because terrorists are assholes.”

    The structure of that Vox article seemed aimed at implying that the final question about terrorism followed logically from the others, but in reality, it had no legitimate place in that article. Whereas the preceding questions convey legitimate information about Ramadan, the last question served only to reproduce the constant cultural fixation on the supposed connection between Islam and terrorism.

    The Vox article was by no means alone in suggesting a connection between Ramadan and an increase in terrorist attacks — a Google search with the question “does terrorism increase during Ramadan” yields many results. Although empirical claims about this increase in terrorist activity abound, the possibility that something other than Ramadan might account for it is conspicuously absent from any of the responses. The question is consistently posed without any context or alternative hypotheses — leaving Ramadan as the sole explanation for any violence.

    An article in The Atlantic titled “Is ISIS More Violent During Ramadan?” is paradigmatic. In seeking answers, this article refers to a 2015 University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) report which examined data on over a decade of attacks by ISIS and other prior existing terrorist groups. This report concluded that “while major attacks have taken place during Ramadan, we have also observed major attacks outside the month of Ramadan, and periods during which Ramadan was relatively calm. Thus, it remains an open question whether Ramadan is a period of heightened risk.” But one unanswered question remains: What was the impetus was for assuming a connection between Ramadan and violence in the first place, other than Islamophobic tropes about Muslims as inherently violent?

    An academic article titled “Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence” explores this question from a wider perspective. According to the authors, “The Islamic calendar provides an opportunity to illuminate the impact of religious practices on violence because the calendar regulates the timing of society-wide observance and because the religious meaning of specific days changes predictably and annually, creating sufficient variation to assess its effect.” While the authors make what sounds like a rational argument, the argument assumes that the Islamic calendar, in the final analysis, will have the most determining impact on any instances of violence that take place during Ramadan.

    This study ultimately concludes that rather than fostering violence, the Islamic calendar is a force for restraining it. This is because, the authors reason, potential perpetrators rely on societal support and judgements about the appropriateness of committing acts of violence during or on significant Muslim holidays. In this case, the authors reach a seemingly positive conclusion, using empirical data to support findings that provide a strong rebuttal to the assumed link between Ramadan and terrorism. However, the research question assumes in the first place that there is an impulse or will to violence within Muslim communities that the Islamic calendar is somehow regulating.

    The persistence of the debate around whether the holy month of Ramadan is a motivator for violence highlights a phenomenon that has been omnipresent in the “war on terror” — the framing of Islam as a national security threat, which then serves as justification for extreme interventions by the state.

    With Islam securitized, its followers, and its practices are seen first and foremost as potential security threats. This imposition of the lens of national security over the actions of Muslims and Muslim communities includes what amounts to an invasion of the private space that is formed by community religious observance. Empirical validity or not aside, the pervasive scrutiny that these spaces are subject to puts practitioners of Islam in the impossible position of having to defend and justify their religion rather than simply practice it. The unifying power of Ramadan should lie in solidarity of belief that transcends difference, not in a common posture of defensiveness that has been imposed on the religion and its adherents from outside.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • When protests broke out several weeks ago in a Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb over the police killing of Daunte Wright, tensions were already high thanks to the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer found guilty of murdering George Floyd. State and local authorities were ready for the unrest — and so were their federal partners. Armored vehicles and soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard became a symbol of the militarized crackdown.

    Other less visible federal forces were also at work. Thousands of feet overhead, Department of Homeland Security surveillance planes and helicopters circled Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis and surrounding areas, according to Air Traffic Control records and flight data.

    The post Aerial Surveillance In Twin Cities Frustrates, Alarms Residents appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    The post Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Cursory Examination of Modern-Day Policing and the Consequences it Poses for the Marginalized

    Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    Levi Gonzalez is a researcher of various topics and issues regarding politics and history including: criminal justice, American foreign policy, surveillance, and public policy. He recently received a Master’s degree in Public Policy, with an emphasis on poverty and inequality, from the University of California, Riverside. Levi is a fierce opponent of systemic oppression, state sanctioned violence, imperialism, and exploitation. Learning from those who embrace the challenge of confronting their oppressor serves as a source of inspiration. Read other articles by Levi.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.