radiofree.asia

Category: Surveillance

  • Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition

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    NYT: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match (with photo of Porcha Woodruff)

    New York Times (8/6/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

    Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

    Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

          CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3

     

    Newsweek: President Joe Biden's plan to cancel $39bn in student loans for hundreds of thousands of Americans

    Newsweek (8/7/23)

    Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

    Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

          CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

    The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

  • Community Organizer Spied on by FBI and Colorado Springs Police Speaks Out

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department and local officers for illegally spying on local activist Jacqueline “Jax” Armendariz Unzueta and the Chinook Center, a community organizing hub in Colorado Springs. “This was one of the worst moments of my life,” says Unzueta, who describes the investigation by law enforcement as “incredibly…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Home Office secretly backs facial recognition technology to curb shoplifting

    Covert government strategy to install electronic surveillance in shops raises issues around bias and data, and contrasts sharply with the EU ban to keep AI out of public spaces

    Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal.

    The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Whether You Live in a Small Town or a Big City, the Government Is Still Out to Get You

    There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

    This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

    The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

    Yet the song gets it wrong.

    You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

    Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

    It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

    Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

    That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

    Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

    While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

    Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

    For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

    We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

    We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

    We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

    And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

    By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

    This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

    The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

    Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

    So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Being Awake

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tracking

    “Your Smartphone Is Worse Than a Spy in Your Pocket: Edward Snowden“

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Targeted for Tyranny: We’re All Suspects Under the Government’s Pre-crime Program

    We’re all being targeted now.

    We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

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

    Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

    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, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

    While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

    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.”

    Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

    For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

    It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report.

    Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

    What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

    The American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick have all been rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.

    With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It’s also 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 peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

    This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

    Yet here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you need to do is live in the United States.

    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.

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

    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.

    Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

    If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine a testing ground for Israeli ‘occupation war tech’, says author

    Antony Loewenstein
    Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein . . . author of The Palestine Laboratory. Image: AL website

    Asia Pacific Report:
    Locations
    Monday, July 17: Christchurch
    Public meeting, 7pm
    Knox Centre, Cnr Bealey Avenue & Victoria street, Christchurch (books available)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/813719740268177/

    Tuesday, July 18: Wellington
    7pm
    St Andrews on the Terrace, 30 The Terrace (Unity Books will have a rep there)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/644521054258279/

    Wednesday, July 19: Hawkes Bay
    8pm
    Greenmeadows Community Hall, 83 Tait Drive, Napier
    https://www.facebook.com/events/6474977775923813/

    Thursday, July 20: Auckland
    Public Meeting, 7pm
    The Fickling Centre, 546 Mt Albert Road (The Women’s Bookshop will be at the meeting to sell books)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/285795137317711/


    TRT World News interviews Antony Loewenstein on this week’s Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp.

  • Israel Is Already Weaponizing AI — But Not in the Ways It Claims to Be

    Do scholars and activists who support Palestinian rights sometimes unintentionally promote the Israeli arms industry? The Israeli military hype machine famously uses the occupation as a “laboratory” or as a “showcase” for its newly developed weapons, but this creates a dilemma for activists who oppose Israeli arms exports. Scholars and activists are morally obligated to highlight the crimes…

    Source

  • German climate activists describe police wiretapping their communications as ‘absurd’

    Prosecutors in Germany confirmed a press report that police investigators listened in on phone calls of climate activists from Letzte Generation (“Last Generation”). The exposé sparked public outrage and rebuke from the activists.

    Climate surveillance

    Letzte Generation is known for members gluing themselves to roads to draw attention to the climate crisis. Police across Germany raided members of the group in May as part of an investigation into whether the protest group was raising funds to commit ‘criminal acts’. Police in the capital state of Bradenburg carried out similar raids in December 2022.

    A spokesperson for the Munich public prosecutor’s office said police are investigating whether Letzte Generation is “forming or supporting a criminal organisation”. Meanwhile, the group branded the police’s actions as “absurd”.

    The Sueddeutsche newspaper first revealed the wiretapping on 24 June. It said police surveillance had begun in October 2022. It included monitoring emails and voicemail accounts, and logging the GPS data of mobile phones.

    Following the exposé, Munich’s public prosecutor described some of the calls monitored. They included conversations between members of the climate activist group and journalists making media enquiries. Police didn’t target journalists directly, the prosecutor said, but they “were affected by the measures due to calls made via the monitored telephone numbers”.

    Disproportionate policing

    Reacting to the news, Letzte Generation wrote on Twitter:

    We protest showing our names and faces, publish our plans, accept the legal consequences.

    Nevertheless, the Bavarian LKA (police) logged telephone calls, emails and movement profiles. Even our press phone was monitored. That is absurd!

    The climate activist group added that it is unsure whether police are still surveilling its communications.

    Politicians weighed in on the news, too. Dietmar Bartsch, parliamentary leader of the left-wing Linke opposition party, called the surveillance “completely inappropriate”. And Lars Castellucci, an MP from the ruling Social Democrats (SPD), said the wiretapping “raises questions about proportionality”.

    Letzte Generation activists have vowed to continue their protests.

    Featured image via Letzte Generation/YouTube

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Glen Black

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Our Ongoing March Into Dystopia And Oblivion

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    Lots of fun stuff in the news today.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.

    In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.

    But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.

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    CIA: Can I have your personal information?
    People: No way!
    Google: Can I have your personal information?
    People: Sure.
    Google: Here's that personal information you bought.
    CIA: Thanks!

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 15, 2023

    A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”

    If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.

    As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.

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    Insane and evil–the AEI dips a toe in the idea that the US should give Ukraine nukes:https://t.co/qiI7UyXchZ

    — Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) June 13, 2023

    And the discourse is only getting crazier. The neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is now floating the idea of giving nukes to Ukraine, which is about as evil and demented a foreign policy position as anyone could possibly come up with.

    This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.

    This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.

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    I wrote an item for Newsweek about how the US government is systematically deceiving the American people about the nature of US involvement in Ukraine — and the deception keeps getting more and more extreme https://t.co/zexOTPTCMy

    — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 14, 2023

    On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.

    Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.

    It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.

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    It’s amazing how many revisions this “actually Ukraine did it” narrative has undergone ever since Hersh’s bombshell in February forced NATO spy agencies to plant a counter-narrative. It’s like watching a slow wiki page edit, revised & drip-dripped across major NATOland media. https://t.co/4lygcedysJ

    — Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 14, 2023

    So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.

    We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We’re in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier.

    What a wild world. What a time to be alive.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

  • Judge refuses fresh evidence in Assange appeal, but there are at least two Get Out Of Jail cards

    On 8 June, high court judge Jonathan Swift announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US has failed. Swift’s rulings are here and here.

    The rulings came just days after it was revealed that new evidence had been withheld by police in Spain. That evidence appears to further demonstrate the political nature of the Assange prosecution.

    Meanwhile, Swift has given Assange’s lawyers until Tuesday 13 June to submit another appeal. However, he made it clear that any appeal should not include a submission of fresh evidence. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to explore this new evidence.

    The surveillance

    Spanish security firm UC Global conducted surveillance of Assange and his visitors inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London over several years:

    According to a former employee of the firm, “American friends” requested the surveillance. UC Global even arranged for the surveillance to be streamed to the US.

    Newly revealed evidence

    The new evidence was revealed during the ongoing investigation in a Madrid court of UC Global head David Morales. As a result, Assange accused Morales of violating his privacy. This fresh evidence consists of files marked on an external hard drive as “CIA,” “Embassy”, and “Videos”.

    WikiLeaks journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson published a screenshot of the files:

    The connection between Morales and US intelligence was first brought to the attention of the London court by Assange’s defence lawyer Gareth Peirce.

    How the new evidence was discovered

    Assange’s lawyers were active in exposing the missing UC Global surveillance files.

    Spanish news outlet El Pais explained:

    The discovery of these new clues about the CIA’s spying on the cyberactivist — who remains imprisoned in a London jail — is no accident. Assange’s lawyers found problems when downloading the records uploaded to the cloud.

    They managed to get Judge Santiago Pedraz — who is overseeing the case — to authorize a second copy of the material seized by the agents.

    Failure to disclose evidence

    Spanish police had failed to disclose the new evidence to the Madrid court. Its concealment is directly relevant to the Assange extradition proceedings.

    Regarding the non-disclosure of evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) clearly states:

    A failure by the prosecutor or the police to comply with their respective obligations… may result in a defence application to stay proceedings as an abuse of process, the exclusion of material evidence or a successful appeal.

    Two famous cases of non-disclosure in the UK resulted in the quashing of convictions and the accused set free.

    One saw the collapse of the Ratcliffe and Drax trials of environmental activists and their convictions quashed. Both trials showed the CPS withheld evidence that undercover officer Mark Kennedy was pivotal to the actions.

    In another case, four people known as the ‘Guildford Four’, accused of bombing a pub, had their convictions quashed too. That was after defence lawyers – including Peirce, who represents Assange – revealed that police had withheld evidence of their innocence.

    Surveillance breaches confidentiality

    CIA spy-craft could be regarded as par for the course.

    But that’s not necessarily true in this case. In September 2019 the Canary reported that the surveillance on the Ecuadorian Embassy involved monitoring of meetings between the Wikileaks founder and his lawyers. The lawyers included Melynda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Baltasar Garzón.

    Indeed, the Madrid court was told that Morales:

    had received explicit requests for information, which stated on several occasions that these requests came from the US, in the form of a list of targets which were communicated via email, telephone and verbally. The security personnel deployed in the embassy were instructed to pay special attention to these targets. Among them, special attention had to be given to Mr. Assange’s lawyers.

    Thus the newly revealed evidence could throw more light on these breaches of client-lawyer confidentiality. Such breaches would normally see a case voided.

    It’s not over yet

    Given Swift’s rulings, any appeal submitted on Tuesday will likely be about points of law.

    However, as his wife Stella Assange pointed out, there’s a possibility that Swift’s rulings could be bypassed:

    Assange’s ‘get out of jail’ cards?

    There are at least two more Get Out Of Jail options available to Assange’s legal team. For example, an earlier appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is yet to conclude. It’s possible the ECHR could issue an injunction to delay the extradition until it can examine the case further.

    Should that option fail, Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson has argued for a political solution. One suggestion is that the US and Australia agree on a deal that takes into account the time served by Assange in Belmarsh prison.

    Matters may be coming to a head.

    Featured image via YouTube – Zabby

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • New Biography Details How MLK’s Criticism of Malcolm X Was Fabricated

    We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China

     

    AP: TikTok content creators file lawsuit against Montana over first-in-nation law banning app

    “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” a lawsuit argues (AP, 5/18/23).

    There is an emerging consensus in US foreign policy circles that a US/China cold  war is either imminent or already underway (Foreign Policy, 12/29/22; New Yorker, 2/26/23; New York Times, 3/23/23; Fox News, 3/28/23; Reuters, 3/30/23). Domestically, the most recent and most intense iteration of this anti-China fervor is the move to ban the Chinese video app TikTok, which is both a sweeping assault on free speech movement and a dangerous sign that mere affiliation with China is grounds for vilification and loss of rights.

    Several TikTok content creators are suing to overturn “Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights,” on the grounds “that the state doesn’t have any authority over matters of national security” (AP, 5/18/23). TikTok followed up with a lawsuit of its own (New York Times, 5/22/23). The app is banned on government devices at the federal level and in some states (CBS, 3/1/23; AP, 3/1/23), but the Montana law is the first to bar its use outright.

    Momentum for a wider ban

    USA Today: Lawmakers announces bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok in the US

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), a congressmember seeking to ban TikTok nationally, called the app “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans” (USA Today, 12/13/22).

    Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23).

    The reason for the swift action is the app’s Chinese ownership. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) said, “Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America” (Twitter, 2/28/23)—a reference to one of the most overblown news stories of 2023 (CounterPunch, 2/7/23; FAIR.org, 2/10/23). FBI Director Christopher Wray (CNBC, 11/15/22) told Congress of his “national security concerns” about TikTok, warning that

    the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations…. Or to control software on millions of devices…to potentially technically compromise personal devices.

    The New York Times (3/17/23) reported that the

    Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.

    Social spying hypocrisy

    Al Jazeera: US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

    While US lawmakers railed against the possibility that TikTok might be used by China to spy on US users, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the “US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else.”

    The funny thing here is that if the US government is worried about social media being used for surveillance, it should look inward. The Brennan Center (8/18/22), which is suing for Department of Homeland Security records on its use of social media surveillance tools, notes that “social media has become a significant source of information for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” The civil liberties organization notes that “there are myriad examples of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants.”

    Even as Congress mulls a ban on TikTok, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the Biden administration is seeking “the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-US citizens located overseas.” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington the power to snoop on the social media conversations of users both foreign and, through the use of so-called “backdoor searches,” domestic. While many governments spy, the Qatari news site pointed out, “Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet.”

    “They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” Seton Hall constitutional law expert Jonathan Hafetz told Al Jazeera. “It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”

    Accordingly, the Biden administration is demanding the platform be sold to rid itself of Chinese ownership, insisting that failure to do so would result in a nationwide ban. The New York Times (3/15/23) said this stance “harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.” In 2020, FAIR (8/5/20) raised the possibility that Trump would leverage anti-Chinese sentiment to go after the app, but now a Democratic administration could finish what Trump started.

    Don’t assume the president is bluffing, either; FAIR (7/1/21) reported that the Biden administration, citing “disinformation” as a reason, “shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine,” a list that included Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.

    An orchestrated campaign

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook parent company Meta paid a GOP consulting firm to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a for-profit tech company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. ByteDance disputes that it has the ability to track US citizens (CNBC, 10/21/22), and the Chinese government denies that it pressures companies to engage in espionage (New York Times, 3/24/23). But TikTok, like other for-profit social media platforms, routinely collects data on users to sell to advertisers (MarketWatch, 10/25/22; CBC, 3/1/23).

    Global Times (3/24/23), published by China’s Communist Party, declared that the “witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’s technological innovation is going downhill.” “The political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility,” the paper added.

    The party paper (3/1/23) acknowledged that TikTok still has a profit “gap with Google, Facebook, etc.,” but maintained that “its growth momentum is rapid,” and thus “directly threatens the advertising revenue of several major social networks in the US.” The paper said that “if the US does not go after TikTok and curb its growth in the relevant market, several leading US high-tech and networking companies” would feel a competitive sting.

    Chinese state and party media have hyperbolic tendencies, but this accusation of a financial motive for opposition to TikTok isn’t far-fetched. In fact, the Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that

    Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

    The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

    Such a move might seem comically cynical, but it’s working. Corporate anti-competitive power has joined an alliance with Cold War fears about the Chinese to influence US policy, to the extent that the government is contemplating censoring media now available to 80 million Americans. (By comparison, CNN.com reportedly has 129 million unique monthly visitors in the US, the New York Times brand has 99 million and FoxNews.com has 76 million.)

    Unprecedented silencing

    Pew: More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

    A growing share of TikTok users are regularly getting news from the site (Pew, 10/21/22)—”in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.”

    A media silencing of that magnitude seems unprecedented; the Biden administration’s seizure of Middle Eastern media websites is troubling, but Press TV isn’t as central to US life as TikTok is. “In just two years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” Pew Research (10/21/22) reported, which stands “in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.” TikTok has announced plans to share its ad revenue with its content creators (Variety, 5/4/22), and the platform played a role in the rebounding of US post-pandemic tourism markets (Wall Street Journal, 5/8/23).

    TikTok has argued that bans would hurt the US economy (Axios, 3/21/23), although the nation’s top lawmakers are unmoved by this (Newsweek, 3/14/23).

    The urge to cleanse the media landscape of anything related to China has been roiling at a smaller scale for some time. Rep. Brian Mast (R.-Fla.) wants to ban Chinese government and Communist Party officials from US social platforms (Mast press release, 3/22/23; Fox News, 6/14/22) because, as he said in a press statement, “Chinese officials lie through our social media.” Singling out the sinister duplicity of Chinese officials overlooks the reality that mendacity among politicians is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon.

    The Trump administration required “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government, granting them a designation akin to diplomatic entities,” affecting “Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, previously known as CCTV; China Radio International; the parent company of China Daily newspaper; and the parent company of the People’s Daily newspaper” (Politico, 2/18/20).

    In an effort to paint the Democratic Socialists of America-backed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) as some sort of shadowy foreign agent, Fox News (2/2/23) ran the headline, “AOC, Other Politicians Paid Thousands in Campaign Cash to Chinese Foreign Agent.” But buried in the clunky language of the news story is the fact Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians, including at least one Republican, simply ran campaign ads in Chinese-language newspapers owned by Sing Tao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper company. Candidates routinely buy ads in ethnic media to reach voters, but Fox offered this innocuous campaign act as evidence of Chinese treachery within our borders.

    Fear of an Asian menace

    Guardian: DeSantis signs bills banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida

    Gov. Ron DeSantis presents Florida’s discrimination against Chinese nationals as a move to counter “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” (Guardian, 5/9/23).

    It’s worth remembering that fear of an Asian menace in the United States led to the nation’s first major immigration restrictions (CNN, 5/6/23) and mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (NPR, 1/29/23; FAIR.org, 2/16/23). It continues to lead to racist murder (CNN, 6/23/22) and other anti-Asian crimes (Guardian, 7/21/22).

    “Inflammatory rhetoric about China can exacerbate the sense that Asian Americans are ‘racialized outsiders,’” Asian-American advocates said during the Covid pandemic (Axios, 3/23/21). Florida’s recent ban on property ownership by Chinese nationals (Guardian, 5/9/23) shows that the impulse to scapegoat is alive and well.

    If official fears about TikTok collection of user data—which is central to the business model of all major US social media companies—can override First Amendment guarantees and deprive Americans of a major communication platform, then one has to ask what more the states and the federal government that are already frothing with anti-China hysteria are willing to do next.

    In this sense, the people suing to keep TikTok available in Montana aren’t simply fighting for their access to a content platform, but are repelling a political impulse that in the past has led us to blacklists and McCarthyism. Let’s hope these video makers are victorious.

    Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

    The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Ultra Violence

    Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from the spectacular growth of a national security state.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • French court’s approval of Olympics AI surveillance plan fuels privacy concerns

    Rights groups including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch call proposals ‘a dangerous precedent’ in open letter

    France’s top constitutional court has sanctioned the controversial use of surveillance powered by artificial intelligence at next year’s Olympics in a blow to privacy campaigners.

    The French court’s decision came two months after the national assembly approved laws allowing for the experimental use of hi-tech surveillance in an attempt to head off any trouble at the Games next summer, when 600,000 people are expected to attend.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Iranian police plan to use smart cameras to identify ‘violators of hijab law’

    Women who break Islamic dress code will be identified, warned on first instance and then taken to court

    Police in Iran plan to use smart technology in public places to identify and then penalise women who violate the country’s strict Islamic dress code, the force said on Saturday.

    A statement said police would “take action to identify norm-breaking people by using tools and smart cameras in public places and thoroughfares”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Policing Does Not Have Problems — It Is the Problem

    Watching the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols for me drove home a deeper understanding that policing as an institution can never be reformed, and that policing itself is structurally tied to inherent forms of repressive control, “legitimate” violence and surveillance. The activity of policing has embedded within it a normative construction of the social world that identifies what must be subdued.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  •  ICE Has Quietly Been Forcing Schools and Abortion Clinics to Share Private Data

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have requested information from news organizations, elementary schools and abortion clinics, according to documents received by Wired. The agency has also demanded data from major tech firms, money transfer services, telecommunications companies, and utility companies by issuing administrative subpoenas known as 1509 custom summonses.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Restrict Act Critics Call the Far-Reaching “TikTok Ban” Bill a “Patriot Act 2.0”

    First off, let’s be clear on one thing: The supposed “TikTok ban” bill — aka the bipartisan Restrict Act (S.686) — does not actually ban TikTok. The word “TikTok” does not appear once in the bill’s 55 pages. But critics of the Restrict Act on the left and right are now sounding the alarm in rare alignment — calling the measure a Patriot Act 2.0 which opens the door to unprecedented digital…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In First TikTok, AOC Says Solution Is Not Ban But Strong Privacy Laws



    Amid a national debate over whether Congress should ban TikTok, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday posted her first video on the social media platform to make the case for shifting the focus to broad privacy protections for Americans.

    The New York Democrat’s move follows TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee as well as rights content creators, privacy advocates, and other progressive lawmakers rallying against a company-specific ban on Capitol Hill earlier this week.

    Supporters of banning TikTok—which experts say would benefit its Big Tech competitors, Google, Meta, and Snap—claim to be concerned that ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform, could share data with the Chinese government.

    Meanwhile, digital rights advocates such as Fight for the Future director Evan Greer have argued that if really policymakers want to protect Americans from the surveillance capitalist business model also embraced by U.S. tech giants, “they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.”

    Ocasio-Cortez embraced that argument, saying in her inaugural video: “Do I believe TikTok should be banned? No.”

    “I think it’s important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders, and this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it.”

    Advocates of banning TikTok “say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app,” she explains. “However, that doesn’t really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don’t know about without really any significant regulation whatsoever.”

    “In fact, the United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books,” the congresswoman stresses, pointing to the European Union’s legislation as an example. “So to me, the solution here is not to ban an individual company, but to actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no.”

    “Usually when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing,” she notes, adding that no such event has happened. “So why would we be proposing a ban regarding such a significant issue without being clued in on this at all? It just doesn’t feel right to me.”

    The “Squad” member further argues that “we are a government by the people and for the people—and if we want to make a decision as significant as banning TikTok,” any information that could justify such a policy “should be shared with the public.”

    “Our first priority,” Ocasio-Cortez concludes, “should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us

    There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

    — Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor

    It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.

    Don’t be fooled, not even a little.

    We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

    This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

    We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.

    The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

    More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.

    After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

    Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.

    The facts speak for themselves.

    We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held onto the money for months. Homeowners are losing their homes over unpaid property taxes (as little as $2300 owed) that amount to a fraction of what they have invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging them with a crime.

    We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Journalist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation lands the citizenry in worse straits.

    We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”

    We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”

    We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong—more than 80,000 annually—that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”

    We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now domestic extremism, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have not ended terrorism but merely sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have caught few terrorists while subjecting all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have done little to decrease crime while turning communities into warzones. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.

    We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army. As if it weren’t enough that the American military empire stretches around the globe (and continues to leech much-needed resources from the American economy), the U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.

    To our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our once-constitutional republic.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.

    Consider it: the penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.

    You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

    We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.

    For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.

    We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.

    How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.

    For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    As French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:

    “Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

    The bait towards slavery. The price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.

    Yes, that sounds about right.

    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 the people” have learned only too well how to be slaves.

    The post Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • First, They Spied on Protesters. Then Churches. You’re Next

    I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

    — Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975

    If you give the government an inch, it will always take a mile.

    This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.

    Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to the threat posed by Nazi Germany’s fascist regime, still applies.

    “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

    This particular slippery slope has to do with the government’s use of geofence technology, which uses cell phone location data to identify people who are in a particular area at any given time.

    First, police began using geofence warrants to carry out dragnet sweeps of individuals near a crime scene.

    Then the FBI used geofence warrants to identify individuals who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    It wasn’t long before government officials in California used cell phone and geofence data to track the number and movements of churchgoers on church grounds during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

    If we’ve already reached the point where people praying and gathering on church grounds merits this level of government scrutiny and sanctions, we’re not too far from free-falling into a total surveillance state.

    Dragnet geofence surveillance sweeps can and eventually will be used to target as a suspect every person in any given place at any given time and sweep them up into a never-ending virtual line-up in the hopes of matching a criminal to every crime.

    There really can be no overstating the danger.

    The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol protests provided a glimpse of exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

    Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents compiled a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    Included in that data roundup were individuals who may have had nothing to do with the protests but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    You didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol protests to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators reportedly tracked—and questioned—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol.

    One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

    The massive amount of surveillance data available to the government is staggering.

    As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This [surveillance] data…provide[s] an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

    In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

    Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

    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.

    Now, thanks to the digital trails and digital footprints we all leave behind, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

    In an age of overcriminalization, when the average American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day, there is no one who would be spared.

    The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

    As Warzel and Thompson warn:

    To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.

    Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

    Case in point: consider what happened to Calvary Chapel during COVID-19.

    Government officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., issued a shelter-in-place order in March 2020, dictating whom residents could see, where they could go, what they could do, and under what circumstances.

    County officials imposed even harsher restrictions on churches, accompanied by the threat of crippling fines for those that did not comply with the lockdown orders.

    Then Santa Clara officials reportedly used geofence surveillance technology to monitor the concentrations of congregants at Calvary Chapel during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, using their findings to justify levying nearly $3 million in public health fines against the church for violating the county’s strict pandemic restrictions.

    Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that similar restrictions unconstitutionally singled out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment and “struck “at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty,” county officials have sought to collect millions of dollars in fines levied against churches, including Calvary Chapel, for violating the county’s mandates.

    At a minimum, the use of geofence surveillance to monitor church attendees constitutes an egregious violation of the churchgoers’ Fourth Amendment rights and an attempt to undermine protected First Amendment activities relating to the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

    Still, the government’s use of geofence surveillance goes way beyond its impact on church members and anyone in the vicinity of the Jan. 6 protests.

    The ramifications for all of us are far-reaching.

    Mass surveillance has been shown to chill lawful First Amendment activities, and historically has been used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, and harass marginalized communities.

    A study conducted by Roger Clarke, the famed Australian specialist in data surveillance and privacy, indicates that the costs resulting from the erosion of personal privacy are so significant that they essentially threaten the very foundation of a democratic society.

    Some of the most serious harms include:

    • A prevailing climate of suspicion and adversarial relationships
    • Inequitable application of the law
    • Stultification of originality
    • Weakening of society’s moral fiber and cohesion
    • Repressive potential for a totalitarian government
    • Blacklisting
    • Ex-ante discrimination and guilt prediction
    • Inversion of the onus of proof.

    In other words, the chilling effects of pervasive surveillance give rise to a constant, justifiable fear in even the most compliant, law-abiding citizen.

    Of course, that’s the point.

    The government wants us muzzled, complacent and compliant.

    So far, it’s working.

    Americans are increasingly self-censoring and marching in lockstep with the government’s (and corporate America’s) dictates, whether out of fear or indoctrination, or a combination.

    In the meantime, the use of geofence warrants continues to be debated in the legislatures and challenged in the courts. For instance, while a California court found that a broad geofence search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, a federal district judge for the District of Columbia upheld the use of geofence warrants by police in connection with the events of Jan. 6.

    No matter how the courts rule, however, one thing is clear: these dragnet geofence searches are well on their way to becoming the eyes and ears of a police state that views each and every one of us as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how technologies purportedly adopted to rout out dangerous criminals in our midst are used to conquer a free people.

    The post First, They Spied on Protesters. Then Churches. You’re Next first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Warren, Sanders Want to Ban Racist Facial Recognition Tools From Government Use

    Democrats and progressives in Congress reintroduced a bill on Tuesday that would ban the government from using facial recognition technology as increasing surveillance and police violence pose a threat to marginalized communities. The bill would also prevent the government from using biometric technologies like voice and gait recognition, while providing individuals a legal pathway against having…

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  • Don’t Bow Down to a Dictatorial Government

    If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

    — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

    The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

    It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

    Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

    First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

    Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

    While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

    “I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

    Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

    Number Six refuses to comply.

    In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

    Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

    Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

    Still, he refuses to give up.

    “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

    Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

    As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

    The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

    As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

    The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

    The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

    Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

    Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

    Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

    Government eyes are watching you.

    They 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 amass a profile 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.

    When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

    When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

    However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

    Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

    We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

    This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

    It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

    As Glenn Greenwald notes:

    “The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

    None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.

    So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

    Think for yourself. Be an individual.

    As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

    You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never stop being prisoners.

    The post Don’t Bow Down to a Dictatorial Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US-China Tensions Escalate Amid Mutual Accusations of Surveillance

    We look at the state of U.S.-China relations after the U.S. shot down a suspected high-altitude Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina last week. In recent days the U.S. has also shot down three additional objects flying at lower altitudes in northern Alaska, over Lake Huron and over the Yukon Territory in Canada. Meanwhile, China has accused the United States of flying…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks

     

    For over a week, US corporate media have been captivated by a so-called “Chinese spy balloon,” raising the specter of espionage.

    NBC News (2/2/23), the Washington Post (2/2/23) and CNN (2/3/23), among countless others, breathlessly cautioned readers that a high-altitude device hovering over the US may have been launched by China in order to collect “sensitive information.” Local news stations (e.g., WDBO, 2/2/23) marveled at its supposed dimensions: “the size of three school buses”! Reuters (2/3/23) waxed fantastical, telling readers that a witness in Montana thought the balloon “might have been a star or UFO.”

    NBC: Defense officials defend response to Chinese spy balloon in tense Senate hearing

    As time went on, headlines’ certainty that this was a “spy balloon” or “surveillance balloon” only increased (NBC, 2/9/23).

    While comically sinister, the term “Chinese spy balloon”—which corporate media of all stripes swiftly embraced—is partially accurate, at least regarding the device’s provenance; Chinese officials promptly confirmed that the balloon did, indeed, come from China.

    What’s less certain is the balloon’s purpose. A Pentagon official, without evidence, stated in a press briefing (2/2/23) that “clearly the intent of this balloon is for surveillance,” but hedged the claim with the following:

    We assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective. But we are taking steps, nevertheless, to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information.

    Soon after, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website (2/3/23) stated that the balloon “is of a civilian nature, used for scientific research such as meteorology,” according to a Google translation. “The airship,” the ministry continued, “seriously deviated from the scheduled route.”

    Parroting Pentagon

    Despite this uncertainty, US media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon’s conjecture as fact. The New York Times (2/2/23) reported that “the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon,” only to call the device “the spy balloon”—without attributive language—within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC, where the description shifted from “suspected Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23) to simply “Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23). The Guardian once bothered to place “spy balloon” in quotation marks (2/5/23), but soon abandoned that punctuation (2/6/23).

    Given that media had no proof of either explanation, it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility—spy balloon vs. weather balloon—equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the US’s official narrative than to that of China.

    NYT: A Brief History of Spying With Balloons

    Of course, governments have also been using balloons to track weather for more than a century—but that didn’t merit a New York Times article (2/3/23).

    In coverage following the initial reports, media devoted much more time to speculating on the possibility of espionage than of scientific research. The New York Times (2/3/23), for instance, educated readers about the centuries-long wartime uses of surveillance balloons. Similar pieces ran at The Hill (2/3/23), Reuters (2/2/23) and the Guardian (2/3/23). Curiously, none of these outlets sought to provide an equivalent exploration of the history of weather balloons after the Chinese Foreign Affairs statement, despite the common and well-established use of balloons for meteorological purposes.

    Even information that could discredit the “spy balloon” theory was used to bolster it. Citing the Pentagon, outlets almost universally acknowledged that any surveillance capacity of the balloon would be limited. This fact apparently didn’t merit reconsideration of the “spy balloon” theory; instead, it was treated as evidence that China was an espionage amateur. As NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel (2/3/23) stated:

    The Pentagon says it believes this spy balloon doesn’t significantly improve China’s ability to gather intelligence with its satellites.

    One of Brumfiel’s guests, a US professor of international studies, called the balloon a “floating intelligence failure,” adding that China would only learn, in Brumfiel’s words, at most “a little bit” from the balloon. That this might make it less likely to be a spy balloon and more likely, as China said, a weather balloon did not seem to occur to NPR.

    Reuters (2/4/23), meanwhile, called the use of the balloon “a bold but clumsy espionage tactic.” Among its uncritically quoted “security expert” sources: former White House national security adviser and inveterate hawk John Bolton, who scoffed at the balloon for its ostensibly low-tech capabilities.

    Minimizing US provocation

    The unstated premise of much of this coverage was that the US was minding its own business when China encroached upon it–an attitude hard to square with the US’s own history of spying. Perhaps it’s for this reason that media opted not to pay that history much heed.

    CNN: A look at China’s history of spying in the US

    CNN (2/4/23) acknowledged that China and the US “have a long history of spying on each other”—but thought its audience only needed to know details about China spying on the US.

    In one example, CNN (2/4/23) published a retrospective headlined “A Look at China’s History of Spying in the US.” The piece conceded that the US had spied on China, but, in line with the headline’s framing, wasn’t too interested in the specifics. Despite CNN‘s lack of curiosity, plenty of documentation of US spying on China and elsewhere exists. Starting in 2010, according to the New York Times (5/20/17), China dismantled CIA espionage operations within the country.

    And as FAIR contributor Ari Paul wrote for Counterpunch (2/7/23):

    The US sent a naval destroyer past Chinese controlled islands last year (AP, 7/13/22) and the Chinese military confronted a similar US vessel in the same location a year before (AP, 7/12/21). The AP (3/21/22) even embedded two reporters aboard a US “Navy reconnaissance aircraft that flew near Chinese-held outposts in the South China Sea’s Spratly archipelago,” dramatically reporting on Chinese military build up in the area as well as multiple warnings “by Chinese callers” that the Navy plan had “illegally entered what they said was China’s territory and ordered the plane to move away.”

    The US military has also invested in its own spy balloon technology. In 2019, the Pentagon was testing “mass surveillance balloons across the US,” as the Guardian (8/2/19) put it. The tests were commissioned by SOUTHCOM, a US military organ that conducts surveillance of Central and South American countries, ostensibly for intercepting drug-trafficking operations. Three years later, Politico (7/5/22) reported that “the Pentagon has spent about $3.8 million on balloon projects, and plans to spend $27.1 million in fiscal year 2023,” adding that the balloons “may help track and deter hypersonic weapons being developed by China and Russia.”

    In this climate, it came as no surprise when the US deployed an F-22 fighter jet to shoot down the balloon off the Atlantic coast (Reuters, 2/4/23). Soon after, media were abuzz with news of China’s “threat[ening]” and “confrontational” reaction (AP, 2/5/23; Bloomberg, 2/5/23), casting China as the chief aggressor.

    Perpetuating Cold War hostilities

    Since news of the balloon broke, US animus toward China, already at historic highs, has climbed even further.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a trip to China. President Biden made a thinly veiled reference to the balloon as a national security breach in his February 7 State of the Union address, declaring, “If China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country.” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democratic ranking member of the newly formed House Select Committee on China, asserted that “the threat is real from the Chinese Communist Party.”

    Rather than questioning this saber-rattling, US media have dispensed panicked spin-offs of the original story (Politico, 2/5/23; Washington Post, 2/7/23; New York Times, 2/8/23), ensuring that the balloon saga, no matter how much diplomatic decay ensues, lasts as long as possible.

    Featured image: Creative Commons photo of the Chinese balloon by Chase Doak.

    The post Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks appeared first on FAIR.

  • Myanmar’s military has ‘turned whole country into a prison’

    Airstrikes ordered against civilian targets, destruction of thousands of buildings, millions displaced, nearly 3000 civilians murdered, more than 13,000 jailed, the country’s independent media banished, and the country locked in a deadly nationwide civil war. Myanmar civilians now ask what else must happen before they receive international support in line with Ukraine, writes Phil Thornton.

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Phil Thornton

    In the two years since Myanmar’s military seized power from the country’s elected lawmakers it has waged a war of terror against its citizens — members of the Civil Disobedience Movement, artists, poets, actors, politicians, health workers, student leaders, public servants, workers, and journalists.

    The military-appointed State Administration Council amended laws to punish anyone critical of its illegal coup or the military. International standards of freedoms — speech, expression, assembly, and association were “criminalised”.

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), reported as of 30 January 2023, the military killed 2901 people and arrested another 17,492 (of which 282 were children), with 13,719 people still in detention.

    One hundred and forty three people have been sentenced to death and four have been executed since the military’s coup on 1 February 2021. Of those arrested, 176 were journalists and as many as 62 are still in jail or police detention.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Myanmar as the world’s second-highest jailers of journalists. Fear of attacks, harassment, intimidation, censorship, detainment, and threats of assassination for their reporting has driven journalists and media workers underground or to try to reach safety in neighbouring countries.

    Journalist Ye Htun Oo has been arrested, tortured, received death threats, and is now forced to seek safety outside of Myanmar. Ye Htun spoke to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) of his torture, jailing and why he felt he had no choice, but to leave Myanmar for the insecurity of a journalist in exile.

    They came for me in the morning
    “I started as a journalist in 2007 but quit after two years because of the difficulty of working under the military. I continued to work, writing stories and poetry. In 2009 I restarted work as a freelance video and documentary maker.”

    Ye Htu said making money from journalism in Myanmar had never been easy.

    “I was lucky if I made 300,000 kyat a month (about NZ$460) — it was a lot of work, writing, editing, interviewing and filming.”

    Ye Htun’s hands, fingers and thin frame twist and turn as he takes time to return to the darkness of the early morning when woken by police and military knocking on his front door.

    “It was 2 am, the morning of 9 October 2021. We were all asleep. The knocking on the door was firm but gentle. I opened the door. Men from the police and the military’s special media investigation unit stood there — no uniforms. They’d come to arrest me.”

    Ye Htun links the visit of the police and army to his friend’s arrest the day before.

    “He had my number on his phone and when questioned told them I was a journalist. I hadn’t written anything for a while. The only reason they arrested me was because I was identified as a journalist — it was enough for them. The military unit has a list of journalists who they want to control, arrest, jail or contain.”

    Ye Htun explains how easy it is for journalists to be arrested.

    “When they arrest people…if they find a reference to a journalist or a phone number it’s enough to put you on their list.”

    After the coup, Ye Htun continued to report.

    “I was not being paid, moving around, staying in different places, following the protests. I was taking photos. I took a photo of citizens arresting police and it was published. This causes problems for the people in the photo. It also caused some people to regard me and journalists as informers — we were now in a hard place, not knowing what or who we could photograph. I decided to stop reporting and made the decision to move home. That’s when they came and arrested me.”

    In the early morning before sunrise, the police and military removed Ye Htun from his home and family and took him to a detention cell inside a military barracks.

    “They took all my equipment — computer, cameras, phone, and hard disks. The men who arrested and took me to the barracks left and others took over. Their tone changed. I was accused of being a PDF (People’s Defence Force militia).

    “Ye Htun describes how the ‘politeness’ of his captors soon evaporated, and the danger soon became a brutal reality. They started to beat me with kicks, fists, sticks and rubber batons. They just kept beating me, no questions. I was put in foot chains — ankle braces.”

    The beating of Ye Htun would continue for 25 days and the uncertainty and hurt still shows in his eyes, as he drags up the details he’s now determined to share.

    “I was interrogated by an army captain who ordered me to show all my articles — there was little to show. They made me kneel on small stones and beat me on the body — never the head as they said, ‘they needed it intact for me to answer their questions’”.

    Ye Htun explained it wasn’t just his assigned interrogators who beat or tortured him.

    “Drunk soldiers came regularly to spit, insult or threaten me with their guns or knives.”

    Scared, feared for his life
    Ye Htun is quick to acknowledge he was scared and feared for his life.

    “I was terrified. No one knew where I was. I knew my family would be worried. Everyone knows of people being arrested and then their dead, broken bodies, missing vital organs, being returned to grieving families.”

    After 25 days of torture, Ye Htun was transferred to a police jail.

    “They accused me of sending messages they had ‘faked’ and placed on my phone. I was sentenced to two years jail on 3rd November — I had no lawyer, no representative.”

    Ye Htun spoke to political prisoners during his time in jail and concluded many were behind bars on false charges.

    “Most political prisoners are there because of fake accusations. There’s no proper rule of law — the military has turned the whole country into a prison.”

    Ye Htun served over a year and five months of his sentence and was one of six journalists released in an amnesty from Pyay Jail on 4 January 2023.

    Not finished torturing
    Any respite Ye Htun or his family received from his release was short-lived, as it became apparent the military was not yet finished torturing him. He was forced to sign a declaration that if he was rearrested he would be expected to serve his existing sentence plus any new ones, and he received death threats.

    Soon after his release, the threats to his family were made.

    “I was messaged on Facebook and on other social media apps. The messages said, ‘don’t go out alone…keep your family and wife away from us…’ their treats continued every two or three days.”

    Ye Htun and his family have good cause to be concerned about the threats made against them. Several pro-military militias have openly declared on social media their intention against those opposed to the military’s control of the country.

    A pro-military militia, Thwe Thauk Apwe (Blood Brothers), specialise in violent killings designed to terrorise.

    Frontier Magazine reported in May 2022 that Thwe Thauk Apwe had murdered 14 members of the National League of Democracy political party in two weeks. The militia uses social media to boast of its gruesome killings and to threaten its targets — those opposed to military rule — PDF units, members of political parties, CDM members, independent media outlets and journalists.

    Ye Htun said fears for his wife and children’s safety forced him to leave Myanmar.

    “I couldn’t keep putting them at risk because I’m a journalist. I will continue to work, but I know I can’t do it in Myanmar until this military regime is removed.”

    Air strikes target civilians – where’s the UN?
    Award-winning documentary maker and artist, Sai Kyaw Khaing, dismayed at the lack of coverage by international and regional media on the impacts of Myanmar’s military aerial strikes on civilian targets, decided to make the arduous trip to the country’s northwest to find out.

    In the two years since the military regime took illegal control of the country’s political infrastructure, Myanmar is now engaged in a brutal, countrywide civil war.

    Civilian and political opposition to the military coup saw the formation of People Defence Force units under the banner of the National Unity Government established in April 2021 by members of Parliament elected at the 2020 elections and outlawed by the military after its coup.

    Thousands of young people took up arms and joined PDF units, trained by Ethnic Armed Organisations, to defend villages and civilians and fight the military regime. The regime vastly outnumbered and outmuscled the PDFs and EAOs with its military hardware — tanks, heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

    Sai Kyaw contacted a number of international media outlets with his plans to travel deep inside the conflict zone to document how displaced people were coping with the airstrikes and burning of their villages and crops.

    Sai Kyaw said it was telling that he has yet to receive a single response of interest from any of the media he approached.

    “What’s happening in Myanmar is being ignored, unlike the conflict in Ukraine. Most of the international media, if they do report on Myanmar, want an ‘expert’ to front their stories, even better if it’s one of their own, a Westerner.”

    Deadly strike impact
    Sai Kyaw explains why what is happening on the ground needs to be explained — the impacts of the deadly airstrikes on the lives of unarmed villagers.

    “My objective is to talk to local people. How can they plant or harvest their crops during the intense fighting? How can they educate their kids or get medical help?

    “Thousands of houses, schools, hospitals, churches, temples, and mosques have been targeted and destroyed — how are the people managing to live?”

    Sai Kyaw put up his own money to finance his trip to a neighbouring country where he then made contact with people prepared to help him get to northwestern Myanmar, which was under intense attacks from the military regime.

    “It took four days by motorbike on unlit mountain dirt tracks that turned to deep mud when it rained. We also had to avoid numerous military checkpoints, military informers, and spies.”

    Sai Kyaw said that after reaching his destination, meeting with villagers, and witnessing their response to the constant artillery and aerial bombardments, their resilience astounded him.

    “These people rely on each other, when they’re bombed from their homes, people who still have a house rally around and offer shelter. They don’t have weapons to fight back, but they organise checkpoints managed by men and women.”

    Sai Kyaw said being unable to predict when an airstrike would happen took its toll on villagers.

    Clinics, schools bombed
    “You don’t know when they’re going to attack — day or night — clinics, schools, places of worship — are bombed. These are not military targets — they don’t care who they kill.”

    Sai Kyaw witnessed an aerial bombing and has the before and after film footage that shows the destruction. Rows of neat houses, complete with walls intact before the air strike are left after the attack with holes a car could drive through.

    “The unpredictable and indiscriminate attacks mean villagers are unable to harvest their crops or plant next season’s rice paddies.”

    Sai Kyaw is concerned that the lack of aid getting to the people in need of shelter, clothing, food, and medicine will cause a large-scale humanitarian crisis.

    “There’s no sign of international aid getting to the people. If there’s a genuine desire to help the people, international aid groups can do it by making contact with local community groups. It seems some of these big international aid donors are reluctant to move from their city bases in case they upset the military’s SAC [State Administration Council].”

    At the time of writing Sai Kyaw Khaing has yet to receive a reply from any of the international media he contacted.

    It’s the economy stupid
    A veteran Myanmar journalist, Kyaw Kyaw*, covered a wide range of stories for more than 15 years, including business, investment, and trade. He told IFJ he was concerned the ban on independent media, arrests of journalists, gags and access restrictions on sources meant many important stories went unreported.

    “The military banning of independent media is a serious threat to our freedom of speech. The military-controlled state media can’t be relied on. It’s well documented, it’s mainly no news or fake news overseen by the military’s Department of Propaganda.”

    Kyaw lists the stories that he explains are in critical need of being reported — the cost of consumer goods, the collapse of the local currency, impact on wages, lack of education and health care, brain drain as people flee the country, crops destroyed and unharvested and impact on next year’s yield.

    Kyaw is quick to add details to his list.

    “People can’t leave the country fast enough. There are more sellers than buyers of cars and houses. Crime is on the rise as workers’ real wages fall below the poverty line. Garment workers earned 4800 kyat, the minimum daily rate before the military’s coup. The kyat was around 1200 to the US dollar — about four dollars. Two years after the coup the kyat is around 2800 — workers’ daily wage has dropped to half, about US$2 a day.”

    Kyaw Kyaw’s critique is compelling as he explains the cost of everyday consumer goods and the impact on households.

    “Before the coup in 2021, rice cost a household, 32,000 kyat for around 45kg. It is now selling at 65,000 kyat and rising. Cooking oil sold at 3,000 kyat for 1.6kg now sells for over double, 8,000kyat.

    “It’s the same with fish, chicken, fuel, and medicine – family planning implants have almost doubled in cost from 25,000 kyat to now selling at 45,000 kyat.”

    Humanitarian crisis potential
    Kyaw is dismayed that the media outside the country are not covering stories that have a huge impact on people’s daily struggle to feed and care for their families and have the real potential for a massive humanitarian crisis in the near future.

    “The focus is on the revolution, tallies of dead soldiers, politics — all important, but journalists and local and international media need to report on the hidden costs of the military’s coup. Local media outlets need to find solutions to better cover these issues.”

    Kyaw stresses international governments and institutions — ASEAN, UK, US, China, and India — need to stop talking and take real steps to remove and curb the military’s destruction of the country.

    “In two years, they displaced over a million people, destroyed thousands of houses and religious buildings, attacked schools and hospitals — killing students and civilians — what is the UNSC waiting for?”

    An independent think tank, the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, and the UN agency for refugees confirm Kyaws Kyaw’s claims.The Institute for Strategy and Policy reports “at least 28,419 homes and buildings were torched or destroyed…in the aftermath of the coup between 1 February 2021, and 15 July 2022.”

    The UN agency responsible for refugees, the UNHCR, estimates the number of displaced people in Myanmar is a staggering 1,574,400. Since the military coup and up to January 23, the number was 1,244,000 people displaced.

    While the world’s media and governments focus their attention and military aid on Ukraine, Myanmar’s people continue to ask why their plight continues to be ignored.

    Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in Southeast Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

    *Name has been changed as requested for security concerns.

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