Category: Surveillance

  • The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.

    Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

    Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

    According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

    The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

    In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

    Shift to authoritarianism

    The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

    In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

    This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

    Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

    Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

    To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

    The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

    At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

    The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

    Net-zero agenda

    But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

    Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

    Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

    But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

    He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

    The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

    All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

    Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

    Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

    It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

    Here’s a quote from it:

    Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.

    Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

    However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

    The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

    Fake green

    The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

    It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

    Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

    It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

    Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

    The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

    In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

    It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

    That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

    • The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

    The post Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.

    Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

    Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

    According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

    The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

    In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

    Shift to authoritarianism

    The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

    In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

    This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

    Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

    Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

    To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

    The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

    At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

    The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

    Net-zero agenda

    But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

    Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

    Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

    But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

    He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

    The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.

    All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

    Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

    Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

    It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

    Here’s a quote from it:

    Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.

    Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

    However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

    The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

    Fake green

    The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

    It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

    Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

    It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

    Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

    The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

    In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

    It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

    That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

    • The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

    The post Net Zero, the Digital Panopticon and the Future of Food first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Judges urged to keep proceedings as open as possible in case relating to Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey

    Allegations that UK police and intelligence spied on investigative journalists to identify their sources will be heard by a secret tribunal on Wednesday, with judges urged to ensure as much as possible takes place in open court.

    Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey asked the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) to look into whether police in Northern Ireland and Durham, as well as MI5 and GCHQ, used intrusive surveillance powers against them.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Orientation

    The emergence of a strange, secular god

     “I am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt not have strange gods before me” is not just a religious commandment. Every nation-state expects their citizens to give up or subordinate their regional loyalties, their class, their ethnicity and even their religion to this new god. If we could tell any culture in the world before the 18th century that we nationalists are willing to give our lives to fight strangers in a land we have never seen, they’d say we were crazy. I am a US citizen by birth, Italian by heritage, living in the state of Washington. But I am expected to feel more loyalty to someone who is English, living in North Carolina because they also live in the US. I am expected to feel more loyalty there than I would be to a fellow Italian living in Genoa.

    People living in tribal societies would think we nationalists have lost our reason. It took a very heavy duty propaganda machine lasting over 300 years to make us loyal nationalists. This article and the next two explain how this process occurred.

    Questions about nationalism, nations, and ethnicity

    Nationalism is one of those words that people immediately think they understand, but upon further questioning we find a riot of conflicting elements. There are three other words that are commonly associated with nationalism that are used interchangeably with it: nation, state, and ethnicity. But these terms raise the following questions:

    • What is the relationship between nationalism and nations? Were there nations before nationalism? Did they come about at the same time or do they have separate histories? Can a nation exist without nationalism? Can nationalism exist without a nation? Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism) thinks so.
    • What is the relationship between a state and a nation? After all, in the premodern world there were primitive states such as Egypt and Mesopotamia that were not nations. On the other hand there were nations within larger polities (like Poland) that were without national sovereignty and part of empires.
    • What about the relationship between a state and nationalism. Can states exist without the flag of nationalism? When were national flags introduced? Can people be nationalistic without having their own state?
    • What is the relationship between ethnicity and a nation? Can one be part of an ethnic group and not have a nation? Can one be a part of a nation without being in an ethnic community?
    • When did nations emerge? The school of primordialism argues that nations emerge early in human history and must have an ethnic core. This group of scholars are called primordialists. Modernists claim that nations come later in European history, anywhere from the 12th to the end of the 18th century,

    There is rich scholarly work in this field and most agree that nations, nationalism, ethnicities, and states are not interchangeable. [1] Despite scholars’ differences around the questions above, they agree that nationalism as an ideology arose at the end of the 18th century with the French Revolution. Since our purpose is to understand nationalism, not nations or ethnicities, we are mercifully on safe ground to limit our discussion to nationalism.

    Tumultuous Times

    It is tempting to think that since the Western individualism that we live under today rejects loyalty to the village, kinship group, or region, individualism was against any social commitment outside of short-term contractual relations. After all, by the end of the 18th century, the world was changing rapidly. Agricultural capitalism was undermining the last vestiges of village life in feudal Europe, while the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism saw loyalty to local communities as being superstitious and backward as it hammered away at traditional religious beliefs. The Industrial Revolution was emerging in England, cutting former peasants and artisan cities from their village roots.

    In 1789 France was the scene of the first modern revolution. Between 1789 and 1793 merchants, together with artisans in Paris and peasants in the countryside, had risen against the king and the aristocracy. It was the first time large masses of people had entered a stage of history. However, in these unstable times, some sort of regularized social order was necessary. What came out of the French Revolution provided for a new, non-blood community of individualists – nationalism. The “nation” stands in a tension-filled spatial crossfire between a cosmopolitan globalization of capitalism on the one hand and subnational regional or local identities of collectivism on the other. This community, or “The God of Modernity” as Josep Llobera (1994) claims, is nationalism.

    Elements of Nationalism

    Four sacred dimensions of national identity

    In his wonderful book Chosen Peoples, Anthony D. Smith defines nationalism as an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity and identity. Nationalism has elite and popular levels. Elite nationalism is more liberal and practiced by the upper classes. Popular nationalism is more conservative and practiced by the lower classes.

    According to Smith, the four sacred foundations for all nations are a covenant community, including elective and missionary elements; a territory; a history; a destiny. A major concept of Romanticism that helped develop nationalism was the “cult of authenticity”:

    At the center of the nationalist belief systems stands the cult of authenticity, and the heart of this cult is the quest for the true self. Authenticity functions as the nationalist equivalent of the idea of holiness in many religions. The distinction between the authentic and the false or inauthentic carries much of the same emotional freight as the division between the sacred and the profane. And, just as the sacred things are set apart and forbidden, so authentic nationals and national objects are separated and venerated. (Chosen Peoples, p. 38)

    The fourth sacred source of nationalism – destiny – is a belief in the regenerative power of individual sacrifice to serve the future of a nation. In sum, nationalism calls people to be true to their unique national vocation, to love their homeland, to remember their ancestors and their ancestors’ glorious pasts, and to imitate the heroic dead by making sacrifices for the happy and glorious destiny of the future nation.

    Core doctrine of nationalism

    These four dimensions of sacred sources in turn relate to the core doctrine of the nation, which Smith describes as the following:

    • The world is divided into nations, each with its own character, history and destiny.
    • The source of all political power is the nation, and loyalty to the nation overrides all other loyalties.
    • To be free, every individual must belong to a nation.
    • Nations require maximum self-expression and autonomy.
    • A world of peace and justice must be founded on free nations.

    Phases of Nationalism

    Most scholars agree that nations are a necessary but insufficient criterion for nationalism. While most agree that nationalism did not arrive until the end of the 18th century, almost everyone agrees with the following phases of nationalism:

    • Elite nationalism—This first nationalism emerged with the middle classes and used language studies, art, music and literature to create a middle-class public. The dating of this phase varies depending on the European country and ranges from the early modern period to the Middle Ages.
    • Popular nationalism—A national community took the place of the heroes and heroines who emerged with the French Revolution. This nationalism was political and was associated with liberal and revolutionary traditions. This phase is roughly dated from 1789 to 1871.
    • Mass nationalism—This nationalism was fuelled by the increase in mass transportation (the railroad) and mass circulation of newspapers. It also became associated with European imperialism and argued that territory, soil, blood and race were the bases of nationalism. This last phase of nationalism was predominant from 1875 to 1914.

    In the second and third phases of nationalism, rites and ceremonies are performed with an orchestrated mass choreography amidst monumental sculpture and architecture (Mosse, 1975). We will cover each of these phases in more detail as we go.

    We said earlier that due to the Industrial Revolution, among other things, individualists began to sever their ties to ethnicity, region, and kinship group as capitalism undermined these identities. By what processes were these loyalties abandoned while a new loyalty emerged? The new loyalty is not based on face-to-face connections, but rather is mediated by railroads, newspapers, books. This is a community of strangers whose loyalty to the nation is not based on enduring, face-to-face engagements. As we shall see, states create nationalism by two processes: first by pulverizing the intermediate relationships between the state and the individual and second by bonding individualists to each other through loyalty to the nation forged by transforming religious techniques into secular myths and rituals.

    The Primitive Accumulation of Nationalism: Evolution of States

    What is nationalist accumulation?

    In Karl Marx’s description of the evolution of capitalism, he describes its first phase as “the primitive accumulation of capital”. By this he means the violent process by which peasants are driven from their land, separated from their tools, cattle, horses and farm products, and then with nothing left to sell but their labor, are forced to work in the factories of capitalists. This primitive accumulation process is then glossed over by Adam Smith and other capitalist economists who create a sanitized version of capitalism’s origins which more closely resembles mythology than history.

    This section shows the primitive accumulation of nationalism. We shall discuss the origins of nationalism based on wars between states, wars within states and their own populations, the manipulation of religious techniques to serve the purposes of states’ own purposes, and the propagandization of the state’s own population in order to bind and sustain popular loyalty.

    European Systems of States

    Before we discuss nationalism further, we need to do a bit of work in disentangling the relationship between states and nations. Since they each have separate histories before they were joined at the end of the 18th century into what Charles Tilly calls “national states”, we will start with states.

    Tilly (1992) defines states simply as:

    • politically centralized institutions;
    • independent from households, kinship groups, economic associations and clubs;
    • functioning to steer social policy and maintain public order;
    • monopolizing control by means of violence; and
    • ruling over a designated piece of land.

    Tilly notes that Europe, unlike Asia, has never been dominated by a single empire. In Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the fragmented nature of Western societies allowed emerging states to develop autonomously and to compete with one another. Because no state was very powerful, these states were closer to being equal, and this equality fueled military innovation. These innovations helped build centralized powers that out-competed other kinds of states, such as city-states and empires. States were able to achieve this not only because they assembled standing armies, as opposed to using mercenaries, but because they pacified their domestic population.

    While the Muslim, Byzantine, Ottoman and Mongol empires tried to incorporate Europe into their folds, nothing was successful. What arose in Europe instead were regional hierarchies based on trade and manufacturing that maintained an edge over an interstate rule’s imposition. What also arose was a system of states. This means that states regularly interact. Their anticipated interaction affects the policies of every state in a way that, in most cases, deters violence. In contrast, in Asia there was no system of states or recognition of an interstate system; kingdoms and empires simply rose and fell. The merchant class never got out from under the emperor.

    Absolutist States

    During the feudal Middle Ages, centralized political power was weak. Real political power was in the hands of local aristocrats and the Catholic Church. But as merchants rose in the towns to challenge aristocratic rule, they also formed alliances with kings who wanted to build up a more centralized state. Under the resulting agreements merchants funded standing armies, thus building a centralized state apparatus, in exchange for state protection of merchant long-distance trade.

    Centralized State Against Localities and Intermediate Organizations 

    Absolutist states in Europe didn’t emerge out of nothing. According to Tilly, they emerged out of kingdoms, empires, urban federations, and city-states and had to compete with them for allegiance. In feudal times, local authorities could match or overwhelm state power. This slowly changed as the state centralized power.

    In their battles against these other political forms, states learned hierarchical administration techniques from churches that had hundreds of years of experience holding together the sprawling kingdoms of Europe, beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the early, central, and high Middle Ages. In order to command obedience, the absolutist state had to break down the local self-help networks that had developed during the feudal age and among those states that became empires.

    The state’s strategies and enactments included setting taxed farmers against poor peasants and artisans, forcing the sale of animals in exchange for taxes, imprisoning local leaders as hostages to ensure the community’s payment of overdue taxes, turning mercenaries returning from wars on a civilian population, and conscripting young men who had been their parents’ main hope for comfort in old age. What stood in the way of state centralization were the clergy, landlords, and urban oligarchies who allied themselves with ordinary people’s resistance to state demands.

    On the positive side, Tilly reports that homicide rates in the 16th and 17th centuries were half that of the 13th century. The state’s disarmament of civilians took place in small steps, such as through the following tactics:

    • Seizure of weapons at the end of rebellions
    • Prohibition of duels
    • Control over the production of weapons
    • Introduction of licensing for private arms
    • Restriction of public displays of armed force
    • Elimination of fortress-castles

    To gain revenue for wars, early states had slim pickings for squeezing tribute and rent from their populations. But as the monetary economy spread and credit became available, it became possible for the state to receive payments from flows such as exercise customs, tolls, stocks (e.g., property), and land tax.

    Dividing and  conquering intermediaries

    Early modern popular allegiances of culture, language, faith and interests did not neatly overlap with centralized political boundaries. States played a leading role in determining who was included and who was excluded in their jurisdictions. This would force people to choose whether they wanted to live in a state where they would, for example, become a religious or cultural minority. Furthermore, the state can play its cultural, linguistic, and religious communities against one another by first supporting one and then switching to support another.

    It may seem self-evident that absolutist states would try to join and expand whatever local identity a people had, such as the Basques or the Catalans in Spain. However, this was not initially the case. A local identity was interpreted as a threat just like any other non-state identity—region, ethnic group, or federation—because it competed with the state for people’s loyalty. It was only later when states were out of cash and desperate for manpower that they began trying to manipulate these outside loyalties by promising citizenship and later education in exchange for taxes and conscription.

    Sociologists and social psychologists demonstrated that among a group with internal conflicts the best way to forge unity is to present them with a common group enemy. An individual’s group loyalty is solidified by discrimination against an outside group. A scapegoat is selected because it is present, visible, powerless to resist, and useful for displacing aggression.

    Building a centralized nervous system: postal networks and newspapers

    States reduced barriers between regions by developing roads and postal systems. In the late medieval world, the emergence of private mercantile networks enabled postal communication (Starr, 2004). In the 15th and 16th centuries, private postal networks were built. In France, the postal system was created as early as the late 1400s, and England’s came about in 1516. They expanded until they linked together much of Europe, employing 20,000 couriers. Turnpike construction upgraded routes from major centers to London. From the second half of the 18th century, the postal network offered regular service between regions as well as into London. By 1693 in the United States regular postal service-connected Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and the comprehensive postal network assured postal privacy. The network of US postal systems came to exceed that of any other country in the world and was a way to bring the Western frontier under the umbrella of the Northern industrialists in their struggle against the agricultural capitalists of the South.

    Postal networks supported the creation of news networks intended for bankers, diplomats and merchants. They contained both the prices of commodities on local markets and the exchange rates of international currencies. Newspapers also helped centralize and nationalize American colonies by pointing to commonalities across regions. For example, the Stamp Act led to the first inter-colonial cooperation against the British and the first anti-British newspaper campaign.

    State vs religion conflicts

    In spite of what they learned from ecclesiastical hierarchies about organization, the state and the Catholic church were opposed to each other. The church was an international body that had a stake in keeping any state from competing with it for power. Before the alliance between merchants and monarchs, the Catholic church played states off of one another. One event that began to reverse this trend was the Protestant Reformation. Protestant reformers may not have been advocates for the national interests of Germany, Switzerland, Holland, or England, per se, but they were against the international aspirations of the Catholic church. Protestant leaders like Wycliffe and Hus called for the use of vernacular (local language) rather than internationalist Latin in religious settings. The Protestant religions became increasingly associated with either absolute monarchies or republics (e.g., the Dutch).

    The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 helped end one hundred years of religious wars, and there was an expectation among internationalists that Catholics and Protestants would choose separate countries. According to Llobera (1994), this helped cement the legitimacy of the state. Religious dissidents caught in the wrong country—Catholics in England; Jews, Muslims or Protestants on the Iberian Peninsula; or the Huguenots in France—were seen as potential enemies of the state.

    In his book Faith in Nation, Anthony Marx argues that one of the ways the state gained the upper hand over religion was to play religions off of one another within the political boundary. In order to organize support for themselves, states commanded loyalty from their subjects by scapegoating minority religious populations. Anthony Marx argues that state unity was not achieved simply and peacefully through an expanding homogenization process carried out through newspapers, railroads, or common political affinities. The actual process was a divide-and-conquer strategy that lasted for two hundred years.

    Anthony Marx takes issue with the notion that a vital part of national identity is in remembering the great deeds of the nation. He says that it is more important for a subject or citizen to forget. This means developing a collective amnesia about past religious massacres and civil wars. In contrast to Enlightenment-era liberal interpretations that national loyalties should be based on citizenship and democracy, which come to replace religious superstitions, Marx says that the state is founded on religious intolerance. Strangely, citizenship and democracy have their roots in exclusion and the amplification of majority–minority conflicts.

    National states

    According to Tilly (1992), state activities involve a minimum of three processes:

    • State making—attacking and checking competitors and challengers within the territory claimed by the state
    • War making—attacking rivals outside the territory claimed by the state
    • Protection—attacking and checking rivals of the rulers’ principle allies, whether inside or outside the territory claimed by the state

    According to Tilly, national states separated themselves from absolutist states creating the following additional functions upon their subject populations:

    • Adjudication—authoritative settlement of disputes
    • Distribution—intervention in the allocation of goods
    • Production—control of the creation and transformation of goods and services

    Nationalism in the 19th Century

    In the West, when we think of nationalism today, we might imagine right-wing racists and flag-waving war mongers. That is certainly a popular image that began in the last decades of the 19th century, but not before then. After all, the breakdown of intermediate organizations—regional, ethnic, and kin—was opposed by conservatives in the name of religious and aristocratic “tradition.” Hobsbawm (1983) says that what we weakened by modernization was:

    • the legitimacy of dynasties, which crossed states;
    • the divine ordination of states (kings were understood to be holding a spiritual office);
    • the historical right to continuity of rule without a political monitoring process (no input from the middle and lower classes); and,
    • religious cohesion across territories.

    In the 19th century, we can identify three phases of nationalism and, interestingly, nationalism becomes more right wing only at the end of the 19th century. The three phases are:

    • patriotism and early nationalism (1789–1848);
    • liberal nationalism (1848–1871); and,
    • right-wing imperialistic nationalism (1871–1914).

    Patriotism from 1789 to 1948

    According to Viroli (2003), there was a long-standing patriotic tradition that was based on the republican forms of government that date all the way back to the Romans, the Italian city-states, and the Dutch cities founded on the presence of political institutions, especially constitutions. The English, American and French revolutions were fought over loyalty to political freedom from the church and crown. While initially championed by the upper and middle classes, patriotism then spread to the lower classes after the French Revolution and the Italian nationalist movement of Mazzini.

    For patriots, unlike later right-wing nationalists, ethnicity, history, language, landscape and blood elements were irrelevant for consolidating loyalty. Loyalty to country was created through the political choice of its members. It did not draw inspiration from the past but imagined itself as a model for future societies. In the first half of the 19th century, patriotism was inseparable from the middle and working classes. Nationalism became more radicalized in the 1830s and 1840s, becoming associated with the working classes and the poor. Hobsbawm (1990) says class consciousness had a civic, national dimension.

    Liberal nationalism (1848-187)

    According to Hobsbawm, the number of nation-states was small in the early 19th century. Before the second half of the 19th century, there were nations without states and states without nations. Nations existed within states and across states. For example, the French saw no contradiction in electing Thomas Paine, an Englishman, to its national convention. To the extent that progressives identified with the emergence of newspapers, urbanization, and centralized transportation, nationalism went with republicanism and liberalism.

    The 19th century revolutions in transport and communications typified by railways and telegraph tightened and routinized the links between central authority and its remotest outposts. Rural people were brought into the loop through gendarmes, postmen, policemen, school teachers, garrisons of soldiers and military bands. The state kept records of each of its subjects and citizens through the device of regular periodic censuses. Census did not become general until the middle of the 19th century. This included records of births, marriages, death. (Hobsbawm, 1990)

    Mercantilists wanted to promote national economic development. For example, Alexander Hamilton aspired to unite the nation with the state and the economy by founding a national bank. The national bank assumed national responsibility for the debts of local states and protected national manufacturers through high tariffs. These measures were also intended to develop the seed of national awareness among citizens.

    Between 1848 and 1880, in practice, there were four criteria that allowed a people to be firmly classed as a nation. It had:

    • sufficient size to pass the threshold in the number of people under its banner
    • a historic association with a current state that could claim a fairly lengthy past (for example, the existence of English, French, Russian, or Polish nations);
    • a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative vernacular; and,
    • the capacity for conquest (Hobsbawm says there is nothing like an imperial power to make a population conscious of its collective existence).

    As the poor and working classes increased in emerging or expanding European cities, they built a new force to be reckoned with: unions. From the point of view of the state, citizens were no longer subjects and their consent had to be negotiated.

    Political membership in a nation was the emulsifier that bound the state to its citizens, with the promise of democratization in the name of the nation as a way states could acquire legitimacy in citizens’ eyes.

    In the last half of 19th century, democratization, unlimited electoralization of politics was unavoidable. It was a new covenant, a civic loyalty, a civic religion that could hopefully out-compete not only traditional loyalties but newly developing class loyalties of the working class. In exchange for the vote, citizens could now be recruited for military duty. By the 1850s as socialism was joined to the union movement, the left gradually became associated with internationalism and while nationalism was taken over by the right wing. (Hobsbawm, 1989)

    Right-wing, imperialistic nationalism (1872-1914)

    Increasing tensions between nations, classes, religions and ethnic groups

    The political unification of Germany in 1871 and its rapid industrialization changed the balance of power in relation to England, France and the United States. In the United States, there were five economic panics (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893), which undermined the trust of capitalists in Europe. The result was a protectionist economic foreign policy in all major countries except England. National tariffs allowed for building up home industries rather than having those industries compete internationally.

    At the same time that there was political concentration within states, these same states looked to expand their territories through colonization. Italy attempted to expand into Eritrean Somaliland and Ethiopia, the Russians expanded into Turkistan and the frontiers of China, and the United States annexed Hawaii and part of Samoa and forcibly acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

    As national states were consolidating their power, a growing number of ethnicities within these national states were fighting either for their independence or for more rights within these states. These included the Irish against the British, the Breton, Flemish, and Corsicans against the French, the Finns, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians against the Russians, the Basques and Catalans against the Spanish, the Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, and Romanians against the Austrian-Habsburg Empire, and the Norwegians against the Swedish. As Marxists have long pointed out, there was no more effective way of diverting the class struggle between workers and capitalists than to point to other races, other religions, or other nations as the sources of their problems.

    The economic instabilities at home that drove capitalists to seek new markets resulted in colonial rivalries. There was war between England and the Dutch (Boer War) between Italy and Turkey; between Russia and Japan in 1904, between China and Japan, and between the United States and Spain in 1898.

    Increasing economic disruption also saw the rise of religious intolerance in France, Germany, Russia and the United States. The French state encroached on the functions and rights of the Catholic Church when no more religious instruction was allowed and the Jesuits were banned. In Germany, by the mid-1880s, the Jesuits were also banned.

    The rise of unions, socialism, and the Paris Commune threatened capitalist profits from below. This led to an “open door” policy among the heads of state, who would import cheap foreign labor to undermine the increasing demands of local workers. The mass migrations between 1880 and 1914 from Eastern Europe to Western Europe threatened the livelihood of local workers and made them more susceptible to nationalism.

    Lastly and paradoxically, the freeing of the slaves in the United States in 1865 led to an increase of racial ideology in the United States. There was soft coercive assimilation of “the melting pot” ideology directed at Eastern Europeans. After the Civil War, the North attempted to paper over their basic economic differences with the South by using the increased hatred of blacks by whites in the South to unite the North and the South by appealing to a white racial nation. But racism was not limited to the United States. In Europe there was a Social Darwinist interpretation of the origin of races: in England Chamberlain), France (Gobineau), and Germany (List).

    Novel characteristics of right-wing nationalism

    According to Hobsbawm (1990), nationalism between 1880 and 1914 differed in four major respects from the earlier patriotic criteria for nations:

    • There was the abandonment of the threshold principle of the 1830s. This meant that a body of people who considered themselves a nation could claim the right to self-determination, meaning they had the right to separate as a sovereign, independent state with their own territory.
    • Ethnicity and language became central criteria for nationalism. This was partly a reaction to increasingly massive geographical migrations of people.
    • There was the presence of race ideology of social Darwinism, which treated nations as organisms where only the fittest survive.
    • There was a sharp shift to the political right, away from republican inclusion and political principles of the Enlightenment and towards an imperial expansionist outlook.

    Building nationalism is not just a political and economic process. In France, Britain, the United States and Germany, nationalist clubs sprang up along with fraternities, national holidays, the invention of flags, national anthems, and monuments (Mosse 1975). In the United States, original motivation for public schools was less for learning and more as hothouses for civic patriotic propaganda. They included flags outside of school houses along with pledges of allegiance (O’Leary, 2000).

    Conclusion                                                                                                           

    While individualism rose in the West by the 12th century, the European political development — including political representation and the rise of capitalism — required another kind of community to house these individualist selves. This was a community that was not based on clans, kinship, regions, ethnicities or cities. It was based on loyalty to a state. In part because this was a new political institution, it took hundreds of years to convince its population to be loyal to it. We said that primitive accumulation of nationalism consisted of two parts: first pulverizing intermediate loyalties while building a centralized nervous system: postal networks and newspapers. However we have said nothing about the propaganda techniques used and the social-psychological techniques used to grow that loyalty. Religion and nationalism mostly seem to be opposed to each other. But in my next article I will describe how nationalist drew from the same religious techniques Christian monotheists use to win their populations over. 

     

    The post Nationalism as the Religion of the Modern West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hong Kong will add thousands of surveillance cameras on the streets and could use facial recognition to track the movements of residents, sparking concerns of totalitarian monitoring of citizens’ every move amid an ongoing crackdown on public dissent.

    Police Commissioner Raymond Siu said plans are already under way to install some 2,000 additional surveillance cameras in public places “to prevent crime, monitor public safety and public order,” government broadcaster RTHK reported, citing comments made by Siu on one of its talk shows.

    That figure will likely just be the start, Siu said, adding that more cameras will likely need to be installed.

    The move comes amid an ongoing crackdown on public protest, peaceful activism and freedom of speech in Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 democracy movement. Thousands have been arrested on public order charges and hundreds under the 2020 National Security Law, which bans criticism of the authorities or references to the protests.

    ENG_CHN_HKSurveillance_02132024.2.jpg
    Hong Kong Police Commissioner Raymond Siu attends a press conference at police headquarters in Hong Kong, Feb. 6, 2024. (Li Zhihua/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)

    As early as 2019, protesters were damaging and toppling controversial “smart lampposts” that had been newly installed in the city, saying their specification included facial recognition functions, although officials said at the time they hadn’t been activated.

    More than 600 cameras will be installed as early as March, in addition to CCTV networks already installed in public housing estates and government cultural and leisure facilities, Siu said.

    No need to worry

    He said the use of facial recognition technology to track people caught by the cameras was also likely in future.

    “We are still in the preparation phase, but we will not rule out the possibility [of using facial recognition] as technological advancements can definitely help us be more effective in law enforcement and other areas,” Siu said in comments also reported by the South China Morning Post newspaper.

    “Citizens do not have to worry. Police will make use of these technologies to combat crimes, but we will do so lawfully,” he said.

    There is also concern that a massive network of 5G networked bodycams increasingly worn by police officers in the city could result in a facial recognition system similar to China’s, according to opposition politicians, sparking fears that the city will soon be subject to totalitarian monitoring.

    ENG_CHN_HKSurveillance_02132024.3.jpg
    Riot police wear helmet cameras on China’s National Day in Hong Kong, Oct. 1, 2020. (Kin Cheung/AP)

    Exiled former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui said the cameras were more likely to be used to target political suspects rather than street criminals, however.

    “The Hong Kong police have been focused on preventing political crimes over the past four years,” Hui said, adding that he expects to see cameras installed at former protest hotspots like Victoria Park, Causeway Bay, the Legislative Council and government headquarters.

    “They could also use them outside of court buildings when political cases are being heard to record the details of people attending sporadic and spontaneous protests, then using the information to settle scores later on,” he said. “This is the most worrying thing.”

    Article 23

    Just installing cameras in locations like the subway could scoop up vast amounts of information, given the density of Hong Kong’s population, said Alric Lee, Executive Director of the Japan Hong Kong Democracy Alliance.

    He said the cameras, combined with a suite of new “national security” offenses in forthcoming Article 23 legislation, could enable police to keep tabs on people remotely.

    “While the police normally don’t have the manpower to keep tabs on everyone, with a system like this they can use big data to identify key figures,” Lee said. “Cameras with facial recognition in MTR stations alone would collect data on a huge number of people.”

    “Used in conjunction with the Article 23 legislation, it could become a new tool for prosecutions,” he said. 

    ENG_CHN_HKSurveillance_02132024.4.jpg
    People gather at the Dahua Technology booth during the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen, China, Oct. 29, 2019. The AI in cameras made by Dahua Technology appears to be explicitly aimed at quelling protests, says a U.S.-based surveillance research company that first reported the technology’s existence. (Andy Wong/AP)

    Taiwanese national security researcher Shih Chien-yu said large numbers of surveillance cameras in Hong Kong raise concerns that the city could become as heavily monitored as China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

    “Beijing knows that it hasn’t convinced many in Hong Kong, and people will worry about Xinjiangization,” Shih said. “These cameras can rotate through 360 degrees and the use of AI technology will then basically cover all groups of people and all kinds of activities.”

    “There is a strong symbolic message here, which is to warn Hong Kongers to stop thinking about democracy, or about rising up, resisting or speaking out,” he said. 

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New York, February 9, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed deep concern on Friday over the surveillance by Ukraine’s domestic security service (SBU) of journalists with the country’s investigative outlet Bihus.Info and called for a transparent investigation into SBU’s actions.

    On Monday, Bihus.Info published an investigation which said that 30 members of a branch of the SBU, the Department for the Protection of National Statehood, spied on its journalists and filmed them using illegal recreational drugs at a private party in a hotel on December 27. The outlet said that the cameras used to surveil its staff had been placed in the hotel before the party and that the hotel’s security cameras had shown several SBU agents entering the hotel ahead of the event. 

    “CPJ is deeply concerned that Bihus.Info journalists were spied on by the Ukrainian security service, which is responsible for combating national security threats. Investigative journalists are not a threat, but the foundation of a healthy democracy,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Ukrainian authorities must ensure their investigation into this illegal surveillance of the media is quick and transparent and hold those responsible to account.” 

    The story broke last month, when YouTube channel Narodna Pravda published a video showing Bihus.Info employees apparently using drugs and recordings of phone conversations about obtaining cannabis and MDMA (also known as Ecstasy) – both of which are illegal in Ukraine. The video, which Bihus.Info director Denys Bihus acknowledged as genuine, has since been taken offline.

    Anastasiya Borema, head of communications at Bihus.Info, told CPJ at the time that their analysis of the video showed that the journalists’ phones had been tapped for about a year.

    On January 22, Ukraine’s national police said they had registered four cases of privacy violation at the request of four Bihus.Info representatives.

    President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the surveillance, said the matter was under investigation, and signed a decree on January 31 dismissing Roman Semenchenko, head of the Department for the Protection of National Statehood.

    SBU responded to Monday’s investigation by Bihus.Info with a statement on Tuesday that said it had launched a criminal investigation into illegal surveillance and that it had originally acted on information claiming that employees of Bihus.Info were clients of drug dealers.

    “We believe that independent media are an integral part of a modern democratic society and no actions of individuals can cast a shadow on any of the newsrooms and mass media in general, and all employees of the SBU must act exclusively to ensure the protection of the national interests of the state and society,” it said.

    Also on Tuesday, Ukraine’s parliament voted to summon the head of the SBU, Vasyl Malyuk, over the affair. On the same day, Malyuk posted a statement saying that the “actions of individual employees” of the Department for the Protection of National Statehood were “truly outrageous” and “unacceptable” and the Office of the Prosecutor General said in a statement that it had instructed the State Bureau of Investigation (DBR), which investigates crimes committed by public officials, to carry out a pre-trial investigation into criminal proceedings over illegal surveillance. “Violations of the rights of journalists are unacceptable and are subject to careful consideration and appropriate response,” Attorney General Anriy Kostin said in the statement.

    Bihus.Info’s Borema told CPJ that the criminal cases into the surveillance of their journalists had been transferred from the SBU and the police to the DBR.

    “We are waiting for the continuation of the story and punishment for its participants and organizers,” she said. “The head of the department was fired, while about 30 people were involved in the surveillance operation. These people could not have come up with this operation on their own, so it was approved by the top management,” adding: “The editorial staff of Bihus.Info believes that the order to surveil the journalists was given either by the SBU leadership or by other government bodies.”

    Several investigative Ukrainian journalists have faced threatsviolence, and harassment over their work since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. Journalists seeking press accreditation previously told CPJ that they had been questioned by the SBU and pressured to take certain approaches in their reporting. 

    On February 3, the military relaxed the accreditation rules that were in place since March 2023 and that had been criticized for limiting the journalists’ access to the frontline.

    SBU’s spokesperson Artem Dekhtiarenko declined to respond to CPJ’s query as to whether the surveillance operation had been sanctioned by a prosecutor and referred CPJ to the agency’s previous statements.

    Editor’s note: The 12th paragraph in this report has been updated to clarify a quote attribution.  


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The post The Bizarre Constant Companion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Findings suggest Jordan is relying on cyberweapon to quash dissent and its use is ‘staggeringly widespread’

    About three dozen journalists, lawyers and human rights workers in Jordan have been targeted by authorities using powerful spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group amid a broad crackdown on press freedoms and political participation, according to a report by the lobbying group Access Now.

    The information suggests the Jordanian government has used the Israeli cyberweapon against members of civil society, including at least one American citizen living in Jordan, between 2019 and September 2023.

    Continue reading…

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

  • RNZ Pacific

    Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has been reinstated after being stood down following riots and looting on January 10.

    That rioting — branded as Black Wednesday — was sparked by a police protest after unannounced deductions from their wages, which the government blamed on a glitch.

    The protest led to a riot causing the deaths of more than 20 people, widespread looting and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to businesses.

    Reinstated Police Commissioner David Manning
    Reinstated Police Commissioner David Manning . . . commission of inquiry pledged to study the police force. Image: Andrew Kutan/RNZ Pacific

    Amnesty International called on authorities to protect human rights in response to the riots.

    The 14-day state of emergency following the violence has now ended.

    The National newspaper reported Prime Minister James Marape announced Manning’s reinstatement, and that of Taies Sansan as the Department of Personnel Management Secretary, after administrative preliminary investigations concluded.

    However, Treasury Secretary Andrew Oake and Finance Secretary Samuel Penias remained suspended “due to their failure to update the salary system, which led to the events of Jan 10”, Marape said.

    Marape also said Deputy Police Commissioner Dr Philip Mina was being suspended.

    A commission of inquiry will be appointed to look into the police force.

    “The commission of inquiry will be headed by a judge from the Supreme Court and National Court, and will be concluded as soon as possible, to look into the structure, the operation, and their ethics of conduct,” Marape said.

    “The country deserves to have a police force that is effective and efficient. We will leave no stone unturned as we recover, reboot and restore.”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Vietnamese prisoner Huynh Minh Tam, who is serving an eight-year prison sentence for “anti-state propaganda,” has claimed he has been kept in solitary confinement for four years, with a camera monitoring his every move.

    Tam told his sister Huynh Thi To Nga about the surveillance when she visited him at Gia Trung Prison on Sunday.

    Tam and Nga were both arrested in Jan. 2019 and sentenced in November of the same year. Nga received a two-year sentence and was freed in March last year.

    Speaking to Radio Free Asia on Wednesday, Nga said her brother was in a 12 meter square cell with a usable area of ​​only about 9 square meters.

    “Tam has been locked alone in a room since he arrived at the camp for nearly four years and the room has a surveillance camera installed,” she said.

    “There is no way to cover up personal activities, from eating and sleeping to bathing and personal hygiene.”

    Former criminal justice lawyer Le Quoc Quan called the move unacceptable.

    “The Vietnamese Constitution, the Penal Code, and the Law on Execution of Criminal Judgments all recognize the human rights and personal rights of prisoners,” he told RFA Vietnamese. 

    “Cells for national security prisoners are very small and all activities are in one room, so cameras can monitor all activities even when the door is locked [such as] going to the bathroom or changing clothes. It is an insult to the prisoner’s dignity.”

    He said while putting cameras in common areas was acceptable, putting them in cells violated the prisoner’s rights under Article 32 of the Civil Code.

    Tam’s sister Nga said that the political prisoner’s detention area has dozens of cells but only two rooms have cameras installed. One is Tam’s cell, the other is empty.

    Tam told his sister he was being held alone in a room with a camera because he opposed the forced labor of prisoners and spoke out about problems receiving parcels from families.

    To protest the prison’s monitoring of his activities, he said he covered the camera with paper but a guard came to remove it. 

    RFA tried to contact Gia Trung Prison to ask about the camera but no one answered.

    Installing cameras in political prisoners’ cells is not uncommon in Vietnam according to former inmates.

    Activist Le Quy Loc said his cell in An Phuoc Prison was fitted with a camera which even captured him using the toilet.

    Nguyen Viet Dung, who left Nam Ha Prison at the end of September 2023, said his cell was equipped with cameras and recording equipment and the prisoner’s bathing area was also under surveillance.

    Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

    — Hunter S. Thompson

    According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:

    a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,

    b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”

    c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,

    d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,

    e) all of the above.

    In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.

    That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.

    We’re all fair game now, easy targets for inclusion on some FBI watch list or another.

    When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

    Clearly, you don’t have to do anything illegal.

    You don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

    Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

    All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

    This is how easy it is to run afoul of the government’s many red flags.

    In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

    We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    For instance, a so-called typo in a geofence search warrant, which allows police to capture location data for a particular geographic area, resulted in government officials being given access to information about who went where and with whom within a two-mile long stretch of San Francisco that included churches, businesses, private homes, hotels, and restaurants.

    Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    These fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the burden of proof has been reversed.

    Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

    Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

    Consider some of the many ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

    Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

    Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

    Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

    Thought crimes programs. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

    Security checkpoints. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots.

    Surveillance and precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime.

    Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

    Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether.

    Biometric databases. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level with a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

    Limitations on our right to move about freely. At every turn, we’re tracked in by surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles in real time.

    The war on cash. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

    These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

    In this way, the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

    What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

    In effect, you will disappear.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

    The post Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • By Gideon Levy of Haaretz

    Three and a half hours. Three and a half hours from Jenin to Tul Karm. In three and a half hours you can fly to Rome, or drive to Eilat. But in the occupied West Bank today you’re barely able to drive between two nearby cities.

    That’s the time it took us this week to travel from Jenin to Tul Karm, 35 kilometers. At the end of every Palestinian road on the West Bank there is a locked iron gate since the war in Gaza started. Waze instructs you to travel on these roads, but even this clever app doesn’t know there’s a locked gate at the end of every one.

    If there isn’t a locked gate, there’s a “breathing” roadblock. If there isn’t a breathing roadblock, there’s a strangling roadblock.

    Near the Ottoman railway station in Sebastia, reserve soldiers stop Palestinians from taking even that remote gravel path. Near Shavei Shomron, soldiers permit traveling from south to north, but not in the opposite direction.

    Why? Because.

    The soldiers at the next roadblock are taking selfies, and all the cars wait for them to finish photographing themselves so they can receive the dismissive, patronising hand gesture that will allow them to pass, while the traffic jam backs up on the road.

    The Einav roadblock we passed through in the morning was closed to traffic in the afternoon by soldiers. It’s impossible to know anything. The Hawara roadblock is shut.

    Like drugged coackroaches in bottle
    The exit from Shufa is closed. So are most of the exit routes from the villages to the main roads. That’s how we traveled this week, like drugged cockroaches in a bottle, three and a half hours from Jenin to Tul Karm, to reach Road 557 and return to Israel.

    And this is the Palestinians’ life in the West Bank these days.

    When evening fell, thousands of cars whose drivers simply stopped by the wayside in abjection lined the roads in the West Bank. They stood helpless and silent. You have to see the fear in their eyes when they manage to approach the roadblock; any wrong move could lead to their death. It can make you explode.

    It can make you explode that Israel is now doing everything to drive the West Bank to another intifada. It won’t be easy. The West Bank has neither the leadership nor the fighting spirit of the second intifada, but how can one not explode?

    Some 150,000 laborers who worked in Israel have been out of work for three months. You can also explode from the army’s hypocrisy. Its commanders are warning that we must enable laborers to go to work, but the IDF will be the main culprit for the Palestinian uprising if it breaks out.

    The problem is not merely economic. Under the guise of the war and with the extreme rightist government’s assistance, the IDF has changed its conduct in the occupied territories in a dangerous way — it wants Gaza in the West Bank.

    The settlers want Gaza in the West Bank so they can drive out as many Palestinians as possible, and the army backs them up.

    344 Palestinians killed
    According to UN figures, since October 7, 344 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, 88 of them children. Eight or nine of them were killed by settlers. At the same time, five Israelis were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, four of them by security forces.

    The reason is that the IDF has in recent months started firing from the air to kill in the West Bank, like in Gaza.

    On January 7, for example, the army killed seven youngsters who were standing on a traffic island near Jenin, after one of them apparently threw an explosive charge at a jeep and missed.

    It was a massacre. The seven youngsters were members of one family, four brothers, two more brothers and a cousin. That doesn’t interest Israel.

    Now the IDF is moving forces from Gaza to the West Bank. The Duvdevan undercover unit is already there, the Kfir Brigade is on its way. They’ll return to the West Bank stoked with the indiscriminate killing in Gaza and will want to continue the great work there as well.

    Israel wants an intifada. Maybe it will even get one. It should just not feign surprise when this happens.

    Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author who writes for Hareetz on human rights and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?

    After all, it’s happening all over the world.

    Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

    In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.

    In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”

    These government-imposed communications shutdowns serve to not only isolate, terrorize and control the populace, but also underscore the citizenry’s lack of freedom in the face of the government’s limitless power.

    Yet as University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye explains, these kill switches are no longer exclusive to despotic regimes. They have “migrated into a toolbox for governments that actually do have the rule of law.”

    This is what digital authoritarianism looks like in a technological age.

    Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

    For those who insist that it can’t happen here, it can and it has.

    In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels, reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone.

    In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked—again, same rationale.

    And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down, this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man.

    With shutdowns becoming harder to detect, who’s to say it’s not still happening?

    Although an internet kill switch is broadly understood to be a complete internet shutdown, it can also include a broad range of restrictions such as content blocking, throttling, filtering, complete shutdowns, and cable cutting.

    As Global Risk Intel explains:

    Content blocking is a relatively moderate method that blocks access to a list of selected websites or applications. When users access these sites and apps, they receive notifications that the server could not be found or that access was denied by the network administrator. A more subtle method is throttling. Authorities decrease the bandwidth to slow down the speed at which specific websites can be accessed. A slow internet connection discourages users to connect to certain websites and does not arouse immediate suspicion. Users may assume that connection service is slow but may not conclude that this circumstance was authorized by the government. Filtering is another tool to censor targeted content and erases specific messages and terms that the government does not approve of.

    How often do most people, experiencing server errors and slow internet speeds, chalk it up to poor service? Who would suspect the government of being behind server errors and slow internet speeds?

    Then again, this is the same government that has subjected us to all manner of encroachments on our freedoms (lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, over-criminalization, shadow banning, etc.) in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, preserve the integrity of elections, and combat disinformation.

    These tactics have become the tools of domination and oppression in an internet-dependent age.

    It really doesn’t matter what the justifications are for such lockdowns. No matter the rationale, the end result is the same: an expansion of government power in direct proportion to the government’s oppression of the citizenry.

    In this age of manufactured crises, emergency powers and technofascism, the government already has the know-how, the technology and the authority.

    Now all it needs is the “right” crisis to flip the kill switch.

    This particular kill switch can be traced back to the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act empowers the president to suspend wireless radio and phone services “if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense” during a time of “war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States.”

    That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

    Given the government’s penchant for weaponizing one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security, it’s only a matter of time before this particular emergency power to shut down the internet is activated.

    Then again, an all-out communications blackout is just a more extreme version of the technocensorship that we’ve already been experiencing at the hands of the government and its corporate allies.

    In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the police state.

    Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these censors are laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, whatever the reason might be, will at some point in the future be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    By the time you add AI technologies, social credit systems, and wall-to-wall surveillance into the mix, you don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship.

    Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    The post Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • With every escalation of United States wars — whether the post-9/11 war of terror or Genocide Joe Biden’s current war on Palestine — we witness an escalation in policing and the militarization of the U.S. border. It is no coincidence that the Senate is currently discussing changes to the U.S. migration system as part of a military aid package related to Israel and Ukraine, in the name of “national…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Finance analysts free of moral scruple can point to Palantir with relish and note that 2023 was a fairly rewarding year for it.  The company, which bills itself as a “category-leading software” builder “that empowers organizations to create and govern artificial intelligence”, launched its initial public offering in 2020.  But the milky confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value.  But this is the sort of language that delights the economy boffins no end, a bloodless exercise that ignores what Palantir really does.

    The surveillance company initially cut its teeth on agendas related to national security and law enforcement through Gotham.  A rather dry summation of its services is offered by Adrew Iliadis and Amelia Acker: “The company supplies information technology solutions for data integration and tracking to police and government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations.”

    Founded in 2003 and unimaginatively named after the magical stones in The Lord of the Rings known as “Seeing Stones” or palantíri, its ambition was to remake the national security scape, a true fetishist project envisaging technology as deliverer and saviour.  While most of its work remains painfully clandestine, it does let the occasional salivating observer, such as Portugal’s former Secretary of State or European Affairs Bruno Maçães, into its citadel to receive the appropriate indoctrination.

    It’s impossible to take any commentary arising from these proselytised sorts seriously, but what follows can be intriguing.  “The target coordination cycle: find, track, target, and prosecute,” Maçães writes for Time, reflecting on the technology on show at the company’s London headquarters.  “As we enter the algorithmic age, time is compressed.  From the moment the algorithms set to work detecting their targets until these targets are prosecuted – a term of art in the field – no more than two or three minutes elapse.”  Such commentary takes the edge of the cruelty, the lethality, the sheer destruction of life that such prosecution entails.

    While its stable of government clients remain important, the company also sought to further expand its base with Foundry, the commercial version of the software. “Foundry helps businesses make better decisions and solve problems, and Forrester estimated Foundry delivers a 315% return on investment (ROI) for its users,” writes Will Healy, whose commentary is, given his association with Palantir, bound to be cherubically crawling while oddly flat.

    This tech beast is also claiming to march to a more moral tune, with Palantir Technologies UK Ltd announcing in April that it had formed a partnership with the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (OPG) to “enable investigators on the ground and across Europe to share, integrate, and process all key data relating to more than 78,000 registered war crimes.”

    The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Alexander C. Karp, nails his colours to the mast with a schoolboy’s binary simplicity.  “The invasion of Ukraine represents one of the most significant challenges to the global balance of power.  To that end, the crimes that are being committed in Ukraine must be prosecuted.”

    Having picked the Ukrainian cause as a beneficial one, Palantir revealed that it was “already helping Ukraine militarily, and supporting the resettlement of refugees in the UK, Poland and in Lithuania.”  For Karp, “Software is a product of the legal and moral order in which it is created, and plays a role in defending it.”

    Such gnomic statements are best kept in the spittoon of history, mere meaningless splutter, but if they are taken seriously, Karp is in trouble.  He is one who has admitted with sissy’s glee that the “core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity”.  Typically, such money-minded megalomaniacs tend to confuse personal wealth and a robber baron’s acquisitiveness with the more collective goals of peace and security.  Murdering thieves can be most moral, even as they carry out their sordid tasks with silver tongs.

    When Google dropped Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that riled employees within the company, Palantir was happy to offer its services.  It did not matter one jot that the project, known in Palantir circles as “Tron”, was designed to train AI to analyse aerial drone footage to enable the identification of objects and human beings (again bloodless, chilling, instrumental).  “It’s commonly known that our software is used in an operational context at war,” Karp is reported as saying.  “Do you really think a war fighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial with their life?  Currently, when you’re a war fighter your life depends on your software.”

    War is merely one context where Palantir dirties the terrain of policy.  In 2020, Amnesty International published a report outlining the various human rights risks arising from Palantir’s contracts with the US Department of Homeland Security.  Of particular concern were associated products and services stemming from its Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  Human rights groups such as Mijente, along with a number of investors, have also noted that such contracts enable ICE to prosecute such activities as surveillance, detentions, raids, de facto family separations and deportations.

    In 2023, protests by hundreds of UK health workers managed to shut down the central London headquarters of the tech behemoth. The workers in question were protesting the award of a £330 million contract to Palantir by the National Health Service (NHS) England.  Many felt particularly riled at the company, given its role in furnishing the Israeli government with such military and surveillance technology, including predictive policing services.  The latter are used to analyse social media posts by Palestinians that might reveal threats to public order or praise for “hostile” entities.

    As Gaza is being flattened and gradually exterminated by Israeli arms, Palantir remains loyal, even stubbornly so.  “We are one of the few companies in the world to stand and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast,” the company stated in a letter to shareholders.  With a record now well washed in blood, the company deserves a global protest movement that blocks its appeal and encourages a shareholder exodus.

    The post Amoral Compass: Palantir and its Quest to Remake the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In the past 15 years, policing has grown its reach, largely through an array of technologies that record and store our personal details and daily activities. Using algorithms and other formulae, authorities are able to repurpose data to meet the emerging demands of the criminal legal and immigration systems. From predictive policing to GPS-enabled ankle monitors to gunshot trackers to massive…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In the wake of the Trump-inspired siege on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many liberals have called for wide-ranging investigations and prosecutions of the “insurrectionists” as a way of condemning political extremism and restoring public respect for the “rule of law.” On its face, this appears to be a progressive intervention aimed at reducing the power of growing right-wing nationalist…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The House passed this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Thursday, with only a few dozen Democrats and progressives voting against the package that authorizes a record-setting $886 billion in military spending for 2024 and the extension of a mass surveillance measure that has raised alarm over the trampling of civil liberties in the U.S. The bill passed 310 to 118…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In an overwhelming bipartisan vote, the U.S. Senate on Wednesday passed a sprawling $886 billion military policy bill that includes an extension of surveillance authority that the government has used — and heavily abused — to access the communications of activists, journalists, lawmakers, and others without a warrant. The four-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today.  Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today.  Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, live in the past.  It is an understandable but mistaken attitude that this documentary will quickly shatter, visually and audibly.  The echoes of those guns that killed President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in rapid succession repeat and repeat and repeat down through the years, and their echoes bang off the walls of all today’s news that springs from the cells of all the little digital dinguses that provide a constant stream of distractions and fear porn meant to titillate but not illuminate the connections between then and now, nor those between the four subjects of this illuminating film.

    Today we are living the consequences of the CIA/national security state’s 1960s takeover of the country.  Their message then and now: We, the national security state, rule, we have the guns, the media, and the power to dominate you.  We control the stories you are meant to hear.  If you get uppity, well-known, and dare challenge us, we will buy you off, denigrate you, or, if neither works, we will kill you.  You are helpless, they reiterate endlessly.  Bang. Bang. Bang.

    But they lie, and this series, beginning with its first installment (see sneak peek here), will tell you why.  It will show why understanding the past is essential for transforming the present.  It will profoundly inspire you to see and hear these four bold and courageous men refuse to back down to the evil forces that shot them down.  It will open your eyes to the parallel spiritual paths they walked and the similarity of the messages they talked about – peace, justice, racism, human rights, and the need for economic equality – not just in the U.S.A. but across the world, for the fate of all people was then, and is now, linked to the need to transform the U.S. warfare state into a country of peace and human reconciliation, just as these four men radically underwent deep transformations in the last year of their brief lives.

    Four Died Tryingdirected by John Kirby, the wonderful filmmaker who made The American Ruling Class with and about Lewis Lapham, and produced by Libby Handros, his partner in exposing the criminals that run the country, has just begun streaming.

    As I watched the first twenty minutes of this opening episode, I was inwardly screaming, feeling deep in my soul how powerfully the film was capturing the essence of the dynamic, prophetic, and charismatic voices of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., and RFK.  All shot down – we hear the gun shots – by deep state forces, even as the film artfully juxtaposes this brutality against video clips of new reports, images of advertisements for silly products, and television shows that kept most of the public entertained and distracted during the 1960s carnage.  Doing the Hokey Pokey, as the soundtrack plays it, but not turning around in a profound sense, as did the four who died trying to radically change the country and the world for the better.  Simply as film art, this documentary is ingenious.  And its use of music is great.

    I was transported back to the time of my youth.  I was startled again by the powerful courage, passion, and eloquent intelligence of those four compelling voices that once lifted my spirits to the heavens, and I felt the despair as well as each assassination followed the other and my spirits sank.  It is not nostalgic, I am sure, to say that one is hard pressed to find those qualities in many leaders today.  Like others of my generation, I am still trying to grasp the depths of what their assassinations did to me.  Bob Dylan, who came to prominence in the midst of it all, referring ironically to his own life and work, has said that his first girlfriend was named Echo.  I think I know her, for she echoed down the canyons of my mind as I watched this prologue and continues as I now reflect upon it.

    So it does get hard to be objective, if that is what you want.  I don’t.  This not-to-be-missed film is truthful, for it uses vintage footage of what these men said and what was said against them by a government/media intent of distorting their messages and their assassinations.  Listen and then research if you have any doubts.  See if the film is truthful or manipulative,  As one who has deeply studied these matters, I can attest to the former.

    And I can tell you that if you are young and never knew about these four guys and what men they were – not in any macho sense, but as true lovers of human beings, men with chests, as C.S. Lewis described those who were true and brave and undaunted by the then current vibes that sucked the soul out of you, not pseudo-men in the “pumping iron” sense, not men who tried to appeal to your grossest stereotypes – you are in for a great surprise.  You will yearn to see them resurrected in others today.  In yourselves.  As Malcolm X said hopefully, “The dead are arising.”

    This 58 minute prologue touches on many themes that will follow in the months ahead.   Season One will be divided into chapters that cover the four assassinations together with background material covering “the world as it was” in the 1950s with its Cold War propaganda, McCarthyism, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, and the ever present fear of nuclear war.  Season Two will be devoted to the government and media cover-ups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies’ and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

    One important aspect of this documentary series – never before done in film – is the way it shows the linkages between these four great leaders.  Beside their own words, we hear from their families and associates throughout.  Based on over 120 interviews conducted over many years, we hear from the four men’s children, Vince Salandria, James W. Douglass, Mort Sahl, Harry Belafonte, Khaleed Sayyed,  Earl Caldwell, Clarence Jones, James Galbraith, John Hunt, Stephen Schlesinger, Andrew Young, Oliver Stone, David Talbot, Adam Walinsky, et al.  It is an amazing list of thoughtful commentators who tell the story for the dead men whose living tongues have been silenced, although we are privileged for their fatidic cinematic ghosts to speak to us through archival footage.

    In this opening Prologue, I was especially impressed with the words of Vince Salandria, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission’s absurd claims, and Adam Walinsky, a former aide and speechwriter for RFK, who made it clear that we are free, no matter what the propagandists tell us.  That freedom to think and act, to make connections between then and now, to see the linkages between the four men’s messages and today, is crucial to carry on their legacy.  That message ends the Prologue.  It is a message of hope in a dark time.

    This opening prologue is divided into four parts, each devoted to what each man tried to accomplish.  That is followed by a section on how they died and the ways it was buried, ending with an Epilogue on why they died and why it matters today.

    All four died fighting the international power structure, the CIA and FBI, the military-industrial complex, the racist ideology central to the capitalist elites’ economic injustice and warfare state – those deep structures of power that have come to be called the deep state.  They were brothers in arms, their only weapons being their linked arms in a spiritual war against evil forces.  They were men of compassionate conscience, warriors for peace and justice for all.  That is why they were killed.

    Four Died Trying is a profound documentary.  It is good that each episode will be a stand-alone short film – that gives the viewer time to absorb its lessons rather than bringing on too much too soon.  Once you watch this prologue, with its overview of all to come, you will be hooked.  It is not just revelatory history, but is artistically made, and, dare I say, entertaining.  Kirby and Handros are astute to realize that young people demand more than lectures, and it is to the next generations that these voices must be addressed.  For although the times have changed, in so many ways we are today faced with all the same problems.  The deep wounds of the 1960s were never given careful treatment; they are now suppurating and the infection is spreading.

    Then and now.  There is a powerful clip in the film of Senator Robert Kennedy giving a speech in Chicago when he has decided to enter the race for the presidency right after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a massive breakout surprise to U.S. authorities who thought they could contain and defeat the Vietnamese struggle for independence; that they had them trapped.  Kennedy has decided to enter the race for President and realizes that supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese government and their ruthless policies aimed at exterminating the Vietcong and North Vietnamese is morally wrong and runs counter to American attestations of the belief in democracy and justice for all.  He says about such an impossible military victory:

    . . . and that the effort to win such a victory will only result in the further slaughter of thousands of innocent and helpless people—a slaughter which will forever rest on all our consciences and the national conscience of the country.

    His was a powerful moral voice.  Who is standing with the innocent and helpless people today?  And who is standing with the killers?  As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”  And procrastination is still the thief of time and conscience whispers those pathetic words: Too Late.

    Don’t miss Four Died Trying.  I am sure it will affect you deeply and force you to think twice over about what is going on today.

    Yes, then and now.  To slightly alter the song, As Time Goes By:

    It’s still the same old story.
    A fight for love and glory.
    A case of do and die.
    The world will always welcome lovers
    As time goes by.

    The post Hideous Times of High Hope first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Once a dictator, always a dictator.

    Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.

    Likewise, any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one, if elected, will be a dictator-in-chief for life.

    Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional thanks to a relatively obscure directive (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), part of the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, which gives unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president in the event of a “national emergency.”

    That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

    It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

    The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

    For all intents and purposes, the Constitution has long been suspended, and we’ve been operating in a state of martial law for some time now.

    The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

    Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

    Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

    We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

    Mind you, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

    Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

    The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

    All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.

    These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

    These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

    The war on disinformation, the war on electoral corruption, the war on CO

    VID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these countermeasures have become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

    This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

    If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

    After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise.

    What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

    We must recalibrate the balance of power.

    Congress must also put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—no matter which party holds office.

    The process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”

    Make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

    The post We’ve Already Got a Dictator-in-Chief: How Absolute Power Corrupted the President first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Privacy advocates on Saturday said the AI Act, a sweeping proposed law to regulate artificial intelligence in the European Union whose language was finalized Friday, appeared likely to fail at protecting the public from one of AI’s greatest threats: live facial recognition. Representatives of the European Commission spent 37 hours this week negotiating provisions in the AI Act with the European…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]

    The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]

    The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The commercial world is proving not only that it can provide critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to nation states, but also that it has the ability to rapidly develop and adapt its technology to a wide variety of missions. The war in Ukraine has illustrated from the outset, quite publicly, the role that satellites are […]

    The post Commercial Satellites Take the Secrecy Out of ISR appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

    Don’t believe it.

    It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

    For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

    This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.

    Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.

    According to Senator Ron Wyden, Hemisphere has been operating without any oversight for more than a decade under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers.

    This is how the government routinely breaks the law and gets away with it: in the so-called name of national security.

    More than a trillion domestic phone records are mined through this mass surveillance program every year, warrantlessly targeting not only those suspected of criminal activity but anyone with whom they might have contact, including spouses, children, parents, and friends.

    It’s not just law enforcement agencies investigating drug crimes who are using Hemisphere to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, either. Those who have received training on the program reportedly include postal workers, prison officials, highway patrol officers, border cops, and the National Guard.

    It’s a program ripe for abuse, and you can bet it’s getting abused.

    Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer, and they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.

    Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

    The Fourth Amendment was intended to serve as a protective forcefield around our persons, our property, our activities, our communications and our movements. It keeps the government out of our private business except in certain, extenuating circumstances.

    Those extenuating circumstances are spelled out clearly: government officials must have probable cause that criminal activity is afoot (a higher legal standard than “reasonable suspicion”), which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.

    Unfortunately, all three branches of government—the legislatures, courts and executive offices—have given the police state all kinds of leeway when it comes to sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

    As a result, on a daily basis, Americans are already being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

    Warrantless, dragnet surveillance is the manifestation of a lawless government that has gone rogue in its determination to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the Constitution be damned.

    This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted every second of every day—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, electronic eavesdroppers, robotic snoops and digital Peeping Toms.

    The government has a veritable arsenal of surveillance tools to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

    Rounding out the list of ways in which the Techno-Corporate State and the U.S. government are colluding to nullify the privacy rights of the individual is the Biden Administration’s latest drive to harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies while claiming to protect the citizenry from harm.

    In his executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden is calling for guidelines on how the government will use AI while simultaneously insisting that corporations protect consumer privacy.

    Talk about ironic that the very government that has been covertly invading our privacy rights wants to appoint itself the guardian of those rights.

    Tell me this: how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

    A government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

    At a minimum, you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, property or freedoms.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests.

    Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

    Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

    All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

    This is the grim reality of life in the American police state: our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

    With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which the Constitution means nothing.

    What we need is a digital “No Trespassing” sign that protects our privacy rights and affirms our right to be left alone.

    Then again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we really need is a government that respects the rights of the citizenry and obeys the law.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • REVIEW: By David Robie

    Just months before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters, Australian investigative journalist and researcher Anthony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory.

    In it he warned that a worst-case scenario — “long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security”.

    Or the claimed fig leaf of “self defence”, the obscene justification offered by beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his two-month war of vengeance, death and destruction unleashed upon the people of Palestine, both in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank that has killed at least 14,850 Gazans — the majority of them women and children — and more than 218 West Bank Palestinians.

    As Loewenstein had warned in his 265-page exposé on the Israeli armaments and surveillance industry and how the Zionist nation “exports the technology of occupation around the world”, a catastrophic war could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians were “undermining the state’s integrity”.

    That catastrophe has indeed arrived. But in the process as part of growing worldwide protests in support of an immediate ceasefire and calls for a “free Palestine” long-term solution, Israel has exposed itself as a cruel, ruthless and morally corrupt state prepared to slaughter women and children, attack hospital and medical workers, kill journalists and shun international norms of military conflict to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, the elected government of Gaza.

    Author Antony Loewenstein
    Author Antony Loewenstein . . . Gaza is the most most devastating conflict in eight decades since the Second World War. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Interviewed by Al Jazeera today after a four-day temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took effect, author Loewenstein described the conflict as “apocalyptic” and the most devastating in almost 80 years since the Second World War.

    He also blamed the death and destruction on Western countries that had allowed the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to “get away with things that no other country could because of total global impunity”.

    ‘Genocide Joe’
    The United States, led by a feeble and increasingly lame duck President Joe Biden“genocide Joe”, as some US protesters have branded him — and several Western countries have lost credibility over any debate about global human rights.

    As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says, the US and the West have enabled the ethnic cleansing and displayed a double standard by condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 while giving Israel a blank cheque for its crimes against humanity and war crimes in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

    The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal
    The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal mediated by Qatar. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    In fact, as Erdoğan has increasingly condemned the Zionists, he has branded Israel as a “terror state” and says that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

    It has also been disturbing that President Biden has publicly repeated Israeli lies in the conflict and Western media has often disseminated these falsehoods.

    Media analysts say there is systemic “bias in favour of Israel” which is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of some news agencies and outlets considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.

    Loewenstein warned in his book before the conflict began that “an Israeli operation might be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility” (p. 211).

    Many critics fear the bottom line for Israel’s war on Palestine, is not just the elimination of Hamas — which was elected the government of Gaza in 2006 — but the destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, hence the savage assault on 25 of the Strip’s 32 hospitals (including the Indonesian Hospital) and bombing of 49 percent of the housing for 2.3 million people.

    Loewenstein reports:

    “In a 2016 poll conducted by [the] Pew Research Centre, nearly half of Israeli Jews supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs. And some 60 percent of Israeli Jews backed complete separation from Arabs, according to a study in 2022 by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The majority of Israeli Jews polled online in 2022 supported the expulsion of people accused of disloyalty to the state, a policy advocated by popular far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir (p. 211).

    Dangerous escalation
    Loewenstein saw the reelection in November 2022 of Netanyahu as Prime Minister and as head of the most right-wing coalition in the Israel’s history as ushering in a dangerous escalation of existential threats facing Palestinians.

    The author cites liberal Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz reminding his readers of “an uncomfortable truth” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Levy wrote that the long-held Israeli belief that military power “was all that matters to stay alive , was a lie” (p. 206). Levy wrote”

    “The lesson Israel should be learning from Ukraine is the opposite. Military power is not enough, it is impossible to survive alone, we need true international support, which can’t be bought just be developing drones and drop bombs.”

    Levy argued that the “age of the Jewish state paralysing the world when it cries “anti-semitism” was coming to a close.

    The daily television scenes — especially on Al Jazeera and TRT World News, arguably offering the most balanced, comprehensive and nuanced coverage of the massacres — have borne witness to the rogue status of Israel.

    Nizar Sadawi of Turkey's TRT World News
    Nizar Sadawi of Turkey’s TRT World News, one of the few Arabic speaking and courageous journalists working at great risk for a world news service. Image: TRT screenshot APR

    Turkey’s President Erdoğan has been one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu’s war machine, warning that Israel’s leaders will be made accountable for their war crimes.

    His condemnation has been paralleled by multiple petitions and actions seeking International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

    Toxic laboratory
    According to Loewenstein, Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” and its toxic ideology thrives on global disruption and violence. As he says:

    “The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defence sector in a future where nation-states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures but instead ghetto-ise themselves, Israeli-style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases (p. 207).”

    By 2025, Loewenstein points out, the border surveillance industrial complex is estimated to become worth US$68 billion, and Israeli companies such as Elbeit Systems are “guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries.”

    Three years ago Israel spent $US22 billion on its military and was is 12th biggest military supplier in the world with sales of more than $US345 million.

    The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of controlling “unwanted people” and a separation of populations is the primary focus of Loewenstein’s book. The many case studies of Israeli apartheid with corporations showcasing and profiting from the suppression and persecution of Palestinians are featured.

    The book is divided into seven chapters, with a conclusion, headed “Selling weapons to anybody who wants them,” “September 11 was good for business,” “Preventing an outbreak of peace,” “Selling Israeli occupation to the world,” “The enduring appeal of Israeli domination,” “Israel mass surveillance in the brain of your phone,” and “Social media companies don’t like Palestinians.”

    How Israel has such influence over Silicon Valley — along with many Western governments — is “both obvious and ominous for the future of marginalised groups, because it is not just the Jewish state that has discovered the Achilles heel of big tech”.

    ‘Real harm’ against minorities
    Examples cited by Loewenstein include India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully demanding that Facebook remove posts critical of his government’s handling of the covid pandemic of 2020, and evidence of Facebook posts causing “real harm against minorities” in Myanmar and Russia as well as India and Palestine.

    The company’s global policy team argued that they risked having the platform shutdown completely if they did not comply with government requests. Profits before human rights.

    Loewenstein refers to social media calls for genocide against the Muslim minority having “moved from the fringes to the mainstream”. Condemning this, Loewenstein remarks: “Leaving these comments up, which routinely happens, is deeply irresponsible” (p. 197).

    He argues that his book is a warning that “despotism has never been so easily shareable with compact technology”. He explains:

    “The ethnonationalist ideas behind it are appealing to millions of people because democratic leaders have failed to deliver. A Pew Research Centre survey across 34 countries in 2020 found only 44 percent of those polled were content with democracy, while 52 percent were not. Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers, Israel is the ultimate model and goal” (p. 16).

    The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington “turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades” (p. 49).

    Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel
    Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel during the seven weeks of bombardment. Image: RSF screenshot

    War against journalists
    Along with health workers (200 killed and the total climbing), journalists have suffering a heavy price for reporting Israel’s relentless bombardment with at least 48 dead (including media workers in Lebanon, the death toll has topped 60).

    The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders has accused Israel of seeking to “eradicate journalism in Gaza” by refusing to heed calls to protect media workers.

    “The situation is dire for Palestinian journalists trapped in the enclave, where ten have been killed in the past three days, bringing the total media death toll in Gaza since the start of the war to 48. The past weekend was the deadliest for the media since the war between Israel and Hamas began.”

    RSF also said Gaza from north to south had “become a cemetery for journalists”.

    Of the 10 journalists killed between November 18-20, at least three were killed in the course of their work or because of it. They were: Hassouna Sleem, director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News, and freelance photo-journalist Sary Mansour who were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18.

    According to RSF, they had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours prior to them being killed.

    Journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that hit his car directly as he was trying to evacuate from Gaza City via the district of Zeitoun on the morning of November 19.

    He was a prominent figure within the Palestinian media community and held several positions including chair of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organisation supporting independent media and journalists in Gaza.

    Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete Gaza ceasefire
    Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete ceasefire to the attack on Gaza. Image: TRT screenshot APR

    Killed with family members
    Most of the journalists were killed with family members when Israeli strikes hit their homes, reports RSF.

    It is offensive that British and US news media should refer to Hamas “terrorists” in their news bulletins, regardless of the fact that the US and UK governments have declared them as such.

    As a former journalist with British and French news agencies for several years, I wonder what has happened to the maxim that had applied since the post-Second World War anticolonialism struggles — one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Thus “neutral” descriptions were generally used.

    As President Erdoğan, has already pointed out, Hamas are nationalists fighting against 75 years of Zionist Israeli colonialism and apartheid. Palestine is the occupied territory; Israel is the illegal occupier.

    Loewenstein argues in his book that Israel has sold so much defence equipment and surveillance technologies, such as the phone-hacking tool Pegasus, that it had hoped to “insulate itself” from any political backlash to its endless occupation.

    However, the tide has turned with several countries such as South Africa and Turkey closing Israeli embassies and recalling their diplomats and as demonstrated by the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last month for an immediate humanitarian truce.

    There is a shift in global opinion in response to the massive price that the Palestinian people have been paying for Israeli apartheid and repression for 75 years. While Iran has long been portrayed by the West as a threat to regional peace, the relentless and ruthless bombardment of the Gaza Strip for seven weeks has demonstrated to the world that Israel is actually the threat.

    However, Israel is on the wrong side of history. Whatever it does, the Palestinians will remain defiant and resilient.

    Palestine will become a free, sovereign state. It is essential that international community pressure ensures that this happens for a just and lasting peace.

    The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Scribe Publications, 2023. Reviewer Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

    But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

    To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

    By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

    Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

    “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

    In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.

    On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.

    For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.

    Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.

    There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.

    The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:

    “[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”

    In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.

    It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.

    Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.

    Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.

    In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”

    Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.

    Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.

    This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.

    The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.

    Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.

    Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

    That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

    Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

    Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

    No one is spared.

    In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

    This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.

    All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

    Think about it.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

    With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

    If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

    Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

    It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

    The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

    Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

    Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

    We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

    This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

    The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

    Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

    Oh, how right he was.

    Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

    We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

    Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

    As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

    What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

    But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

    To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

    By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

    Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

    “Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

    In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.

    On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.

    For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.

    Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.

    There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.

    The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:

    “[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”

    In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.

    It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.

    Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.

    Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.

    In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”

    Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.

    Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.

    This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.

    The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.

    Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.

    Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

    That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

    Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

    Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

    No one is spared.

    In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

    This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.

    All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

    Think about it.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

    With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

    If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

    Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

    It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

    The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

    Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

    Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

    We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.

    Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

    This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

    The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

    Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

    Oh, how right he was.

    Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

    We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

    Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

    As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

    What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

    Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.