Category: Surveillance

  • Analysis: while identity of hackers is not known in this case, Palestinians have long been spied on by Israeli military

    The disclosure that Palestinian human rights defenders were reportedly hacked using NSO’s Pegasus spyware will come as little surprise to two groups of people: Palestinians themselves and the Israeli military and intelligence cyber operatives who have long spied on Palestinians.

    While it is not known who was responsible for the hacking in this instance, what is very well documented is the role of the Israeli military’s 8200 cyberwarfare unit – known in Hebrew as the Yehida Shmoneh-Matayim – in the widespread spying on Palestinian society.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Muslim citizens are suing the FBI for subjecting them to undercover surveillance after 9/11 in violation of rights

    On Monday, the US supreme court will hear arguments in a case which could determine whether the US government faces accountability for its mass surveillance of Muslim Americans after 9/11.

    The nine justices will be asked to decide on whether Muslim US citizens who were subjected to undercover surveillance by a paid informant at their southern California mosque can receive redress through the courts.

    Continue reading…

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

  • For Julian Assange and those closest to him, the journey to the Royal Courts of Justice this week has been arduous and fraught with nail-biting intrigue and danger. Scheduled to appear on October 27 and 28, Assange will be subjected to a US appeal against an earlier judgement by a lower Court that found in his favor. While the US attempt to strike down the previous finding again places Assange in grave peril, this time the passing months have played in his favor, as growing support for the WikiLeaks publisher has invigorated and swelled the numbers of various grassroots campaigns demanding his freedom.

    Assange’s lawyers will arrive armed with statements in support by 25 leading press freedom and human rights organizations, calling in unison for an immediate end to the more than decade-long multi-jurisdictional lawfare waged against the Australian journalist.

    The post CIA And DoD-Connected Organizations Mapping WikiLeaks Supporters appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • [Editor’s Note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the rise of the American security state after the September 11th attacks, The Dissenter continues a retrospective on this transformation in policing and government.]

    Mark Klein worked for over twenty years as a technician for the AT&T Corporation. He blew the whistle on the AT&T’s collaboration with the National Security Agency, which allowed for warrantless wiretapping of phone and internet communications.

    In 2006, Klein came to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with documents of AT&T’s involvement in the United States’ domestic spying program. His whistleblowing became the basis of the organization’s lawsuit against the NSA.

    According to Kevin Bankston [PDF], who was an EFF staff attorney, Klein described the “technology behind AT&T’s participation in the program, whereby the NSA had been given complete access  to  the  Internet  traffic  transiting  through  at  least  one,  and  probably  more,  AT&T  Internet  facilities.”

    “A secret, NSA-controlled room in an AT&T office” was constructed and splitters copied light signals that were transferred across fiber-optic cables in order to give the government access to AT&T customers’ private data.

    The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, or the PATRIOT Act, helped to create a security climate that encouraged this kind of public-private partnership between AT&T and the NSA.

    It was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. However, versions of the legislation, which gave the government expanded authority to engage in mass surveillance and data collection, including against American citizens, were passed earlier in October.

    Only a few members of Congress raised the kind of objections which contemplated the types of abuses, which Klein and other whistleblowers exposed.

    Debated In The ‘Most Undemocratic Way Possible,’ Opposed By Only One Senator

    The PATRIOT Act was developed in 45 days. Several representatives admitted they had not read the bill. Open debate was largely forbidden and amendments to the legislation were discouraged.

    Only one U.S. senator voted against the bill—Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

    Feingold nobly attempted on October 11 to amend the PATRIOT Act to remove some of its worst elements. He tried to amend it so an anti-hacking provision was narrowed. He believed it could “allow universities, libraries, and employers to permit government surveillance of people who are permitted to use the computer facilities of those entities. Such surveillance would take place without a judicial order or probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed.”

    A second amendment offered urged senators to a safeguard in the “roving wiretap authority” section of the bill. Feingold believed an order in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should have been required to “ascertain that the target of the surveillance [was] actually in the house that [was] bugged, or using the phone that [was] tapped.”

    Yet another amendment involved section 215, which stated all business records could be compelled for production by the FBI, including medical records from a hospital or doctor, educational records, or records of books a person checked out from a library. Feingold tried to make sure this provision did not become “the platform or an excuse for a fishing expedition for damaging information on American citizens who are not the subjects of FISA surveillance.”

    Feingold tried to warn senators of what would happen if terrorists were rewarded by the United States weakening freedoms. He also cautioned against the “mistreatment of Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, South Asians, or others” in the United States. “Already, one day after the attacks, we were hearing news reports that misguided anger against people of these backgrounds had led to harassment, violence, and even death.”

    “Our national consciousness still bears the stain and the scars of those events: the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the injustices perpetrated against German Americans and Italian-Americans, the blacklisting of supposed communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and the surveillance and harassment of antiwar protesters, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the Vietnam War.

    “We must not allow this piece of our past to become prologue,” Feingold declared.

    But the Senate did not heed his words of caution. All three of the amendments were defeated. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat from South Dakota, opposed the amendments on procedural grounds, claiming there was no time to delay passage of the PATRIOT Act.

    In the House of Representatives, a small number of representatives objected.

    Representative Bobby Scott contended the legislation was not “limited to terrorism.” It reduced standards for foreign intelligence wiretapping, allowed for a roving wiretap, and the ability to use information from a roving wiretap in a criminal investigation. This would allow the government to “conduct a criminal investigation without probable cause.”

    Both Scott and Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee were concerned about provisions that could be used to permit the indefinite detention of Americans. Scott was bothered by the parts of the bill that would permit secret searches referred to as “sneak-and-peak.”

    Representative Tom Udall protested the fact that members were not allowed to offer amendments.  “At no point in the debate in this very profound set of issues have we had a procedure whereby the most democratic institution in our government, the House of Representatives, engages in democracy.”

    “This bill, ironically, which has been given all of these high-flying acronyms, it is the PATRIOT bill, it is the U.S.A. bill, it is the stand up and sing the Star-Spangled Banner bill, has been debated in the most undemocratic way possible, and it is not worthy of this institution,” Udall added.

    While Congress granted U.S. security agencies enormously expanded power, the FBI detained and questioned hundreds of Arabs, Muslims, or South Asians about the 9/11 attacks. They were held for months and not charged with any crimes. Under the pretext of “immigration violations,” Attorney General Ashcroft kept them in squalid jail conditions and then deported most of them.

    Thomas Tamm, who was an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department (Screen shot from PBS FRONTLINE and fair use as it is included for the purpose of news commentary)

    Exposing Warrantless Wiretapping By The Bush Administration

    As journalist Michael Isikoff reported for Newsweek, Thomas Tamm, an attorney at the Justice Department, “stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program” that involved spying on citizens. Special rules for the unit enabled the section to hide NSA activities from judges on the FISA court. (It was often referred to as “The Program.”)

    Tamm contacted the New York Times and became a source for the Eric Lichtblau and James Risen report published in 2006, which revealed that Bush secretly authorized the NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping through a program known as Stellar Wind.

    “I asked a supervisor of mine if she knew what ‘The Program’ was about,” recalled Tamm during an interview for PBS FRONTLINE. “She told me that she just assumed that what we were doing was illegal and she didn’t want to ask any questions. That really ate away at me and bothered me, because I thought I had gone into law enforcement to enforce the law. I didn’t like the fact that I thought, or that a supervisor thought, that we might be doing something illegal.”

    Tamm contacted someone with a top-secret security clearance on Capitol Hill, who he knew from working on a prior case. He asked her to find out what Congress knew and if representatives, especially those on the intelligence committees, understood what was being done. She did not really help him uncover any answers. He emailed and asked again for her assistance. When she said she could not help him, he said he would have to go the press.

    “You know, Tom, whistleblowers frequently don’t end up very well,” Tamm’s contact replied.

    At first, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller allowed the Bush White House to pressure the media organization into not publishing the story before Bush was re-elected in 2004. After Risen threatened to include it in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, the Times moved to publish in December 2005 before Risen’s book was released.

    In retaliation for exposing this “separate track” in the government for authorizing secret and illegal surveillance, the FBI raided Tamm’s home on August 1, 2007. His family endured a lot of hardship. He believed he could be indicted by the Justice Department at any moment and turned to Isikoff to get his story out on what he did and why he did it.

    Tamm was granted immunity in April 2011 to testify before a grand jury investigating leaks published by Risen from the CIA. He testified on details that were not previously agreed upon, but since he was not ashamed of what he did, Tamm felt no reason to hold back. And once that was over, the Justice Department indicated there would be no charges.

    ‘All The Lawyers Have Approved It. It’s Legal’

    NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake spoke over the phone in October 2001 with one of the top lawyers in the NSA. He was concerned that Stellar Wind or “The Program,” which gathered the phone calls and Internet communications of millions of Americans, was illegal.

    When asked about this conversation by PBS FRONTLINE, that lawyer, Vito Potenza, pretended not to remember the phone call. He also indicated he would have ignored Drake’s concerns.

    “Don’t bother me with this. I mean, you know, the minute he said, if he did say you’re using this to violate the Constitution, I mean, I probably would have stopped the conversation at that point quite frankly. So, I mean, if that’s what he said he said, then anything after that I probably wasn’t listening to anyway,” Potenza told PBS FRONTLINE.

    Drake said he “confronted” Potenza “directly in the most direct language possible,” accusing the NSA of “violating the Constitution.” Potenza knew the truth and “chose to go with ‘The Program.’ And anybody questioning ‘The Program’ was a threat.”

    Along with NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe, Drake found that a program called ThinThread no longer had its privacy protections when collecting data. The automatic encryption of U.S. person-related data was suspended. Instead, an algorithm called Mainway linked phone numbers together as data was collected. The agency then went to telecommunications companies like AT&T and requested “bulk-copy records” of Americans.

    This convinced Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe to leave the NSA, but Drake remained and attempted to blow the whistle through “proper channels.”

    In September 2002, Binney, Wiebe, and Diane Roark, who worked for the House Intelligence Committee, filed a “confidential complaint” with the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Defense. They complained about a “billion dollar boondoggle” called Trailblazer and how officials all the way up to NSA chief Michael Hayden violated regulations by going with this project instead of ThinThread.

    It was a felony to engage in this kind of warrantless surveillance, but the names of these individuals who worked for NSA were passed along to the Justice Department for investigation.

    After the New York Times finally published the story from Risen and Lichtblau exposing the Bush wiretapping scandal, the FBI targeted them. They had their homes raided. Drake was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

    During that phone call, Drake attempted to warn the the NSA’s top lawyer that what the NSA was doing after the 9/11 attacks was illegal.

    “The hair literally was up on the back of my neck, because he proceeded to tell me: ‘You don’t understand. All the lawyers have approved it. It’s legal. The White House has authorized NSA to serve as the executive agent for ‘the Program.’”

    Stumbling Across More Warrantless Surveillance By ‘Major Telecom’

    In 2008, Congress deliberated over legislation known as the FISA Amendments Act that included retroactive immunity for telecommunications corporations like AT&T, which were vulnerable to lawsuits following revelations from whistleblowers like Mark Klein and Thomas Tamm.

    Babak Pasdar, an information technology security expert, came forward [PDF] in February 2008 with evidence that indicated a “major telecommunications giant” likely gave a U.S. government entity “access to every communication coming through that company’s infrastructure, including every email, internet use, document transmission, video, and text message, as well as the ability to listen in on any phone call.”

    Members of Congress, including John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter, described the “Quantico Circuit” that Pasdar observed.

    “In the course of his work, he discovered that an unidentified third party had been given unfettered and unsecured access to all of the data transmissions it carried,” the letter added. “When Mr. Pasdar identified this security breach and made suggestions about how to correct the situation, representatives of the carrier reportedly refused to secure the network. Moreover, they refused to implement tracking programs to identify what data were accessed.”

    According to Pasdar, the access to the carrier’s data center infrastructure included the carrier’s fraud detection system. That was not benign to him. The fraud detection system had the ability to “track all mobile devices by geography.”

    Pasdar’s allegations echoed those from Klein, but one key issue for members of Congress was that the telecommunications companies that participated in wiretapping without any court orders or warrants were prohibited from talking to Congress. President George W. Bush would not let them.

    Unfortunately, the whistleblowing of Klein and Pasdar was disregarded by Congress. The FISA Amendments Act, as the ACLU put it, legalized “mass, untargeted, and unwarranted spying” on international phone calls and emails. It restricted judicial oversight of surveillance by the FISA court and granted companies like AT&T retroactive immunity.

    Senator Barack Obama made it clear during his presidential campaign that he would “support a filibuster of any bill that [included] retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.” When it came time, he declined to filibuster, and he voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which passed 69-28 in the Senate.

    First interview NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did where he revealed he was behind the revelations around mass surveillance programs (Screen shot from Guardian and included for purposes of news commentary)

    Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made the decision to become a whistleblower after he came across a classified 2009 inspector general’s report on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program developed under Bush.

    “You can’t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have,” Snowden declared in an interview with Risen in 2013. “If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all, secret powers become tremendously dangerous.”

    In 2013, Snowden provided numerous documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that exposed NSA mass surveillance programs, especially those established after the 9/11 attacks, to unprecedented scrutiny.

    The first major revelation from Snowden concerned a document that showed the NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily under section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined [PDF] the collection was illegal and outside the scope of what Congress authorized.

    Further revelations included (but were not limited to): a program called PRISM, which involved real-time collection of communications from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, etc; the collection of email and chat contact lists from millions of people around the world; a “Dishfire” program that collected 200 million text messages per day that the NSA could use to mine contact information, location data, and credit card details; an NSA “loophole” that allowed agents to search U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls without a warrant; and the targeting of messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp or encryption tools like Tor.

    What Snowden disclosed about surveillance, which was justified by the passage of the PATRIOT Act, showed U.S. security agencies were collecting all the data they could vacuum and copy on to their servers. It prompted a serious but rare conversation among lawmakers and the media about the powers the NSA abuses and the legal authorities the government claimed, which were never granted. Quite a number of programs that officials could not publicly defend were paused or discontinued.

    Even a Drug Enforcement Administration program called USTO that harvested the records of billions of American’s international phone calls for more than two decades was ended by the Justice Department in September 2013 because of Snowden’s whistleblowing.

    As the New York Times wrote in an editorial in January 2014, “Snowden told The Washington Post earlier this month that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action. (The NSA. says there is no evidence of this.) That’s almost certainly because the agency and its leaders don’t consider these collection programs to be an abuse and would never have acted on Mr. Snowden’s concerns.

    “Snowden was clearly justified in believing that the only way to blow the whistle on this kind of intelligence-gathering was to expose it to the public and let the resulting furor do the work his superiors would not.”

    Despite the modest reforms embraced by lawmakers and the shift in public attitudes toward mass surveillance, Snowden continues to face charges under the Espionage Act and lives in exile under asylum in Russia.Obama reauthorized key provisions in the PATRIOT Act in 2012, but in 2020, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions mostly expired in 2020 when the House of Representatives failed to renew them.

    The post The PATRIOT Act And The Whistleblowers Who Challenged Mass Surveillance After 9/11 appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • The Home Office is currently carrying out a consultation on reforms to the Official Secrets Act. There are a range of concerning aspects in this outline from the government. Much of the media coverage so far has focused on the potential threat to investigative journalism. But another equally worrying aspect of the possible reforms are the suggestions of giving police greater powers to use crime prediction strategies.

    As part of the investigations unit’s work on #ResistBigBrother we’ve been examining abuses of police power, the impact on communities, and the cost to the public. Now, we turn to this emerging consultation to keep a close eye on what the Home Office is planning after it’s attempts to push through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

    What does the consultation say?

    The Home Office says in the consultation:

    It is the Government’s ambition to now create a modern and comprehensive legislative framework similar to that which has developed for counter terrorism.

    One prominent prong of counter-terror strategy has been Prevent. The programme is an example of pre-crime: policing that operates to stop a potential crime before it happens. The Prevent duty requires medical professionals, teachers, and other community figures to report anybody they suspect has the potential to be ‘radicalised.’

    While Prevent is supposed to tackle all forms of “extremism,” including the rising threat from far-right groups. The reality is that it’s a racist strategy which targets and surveils Muslims. The Home Office’s indication that reforms to the Official Secrets Act will model reforms on counter-terror strategies like Prevent is a dire threat to civil liberties and freedoms. The Home Office claim in the consultation that:

    The Government is of the view that the existing legislation does not sufficiently capture the discernible and very real threat posed by state threats and therefore, reform of all of the Official Secrets Acts is central to the UK’s ability to tackle it.

    “Acts preparatory to espionage”

    Pre-crime is sometimes known as predictive policing, and includes the use of data to assist with police strategies. For example, the consultation states:

    It is important that law enforcement can arrest those looking to conduct espionage at a preparatory stage, as this is the best means of ensuring that sensitive information remains secure.

    This is a textbook definition of pre-crime, or predictive policing, and points to how the Home Office intends to surveil and punish those who have not yet actually committed a crime.

    .. we would seek to criminalise relevant acts carried out in the lead up to hostile activity, which would enable the police to intervene at an early stage before these preparatory acts can culminate into serious harm.

    The consultation also argues in favour of keeping existing search powers under Section 9 of the Official Secrets Act 1911. Unlike ordinary search warrants that require the police to have reasonable grounds for “believing” that an indictable offence has been committed, the 1911 power allows for searches when there are reasonable grounds for “suspecting” an offence will be committed. Furthermore, normally search warrants can only be issued by a court. However, the 1911 powers allow a superintendent to issue a warrant in an emergency.

    It argues that these powers should be kept because:

    Other search powers provided under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), have not been found to adequately provide the police in England and Wales with the swift preventative powers they require to address the espionage threat.

    These powers are particularly chilling in the context of a consultation that seeks to strengthen and expand the scope of the Official Secrets Act.

    How does predictive policing work?

    A recent campaign from human rights organisation Liberty conducted research into predictive policing in the UK:

    Our research has revealed that at least 14 UK police forces have used or intend to use discriminatory computer algorithms to predict where crime will be committed and by whom.

    Liberty is calling for an end to the “use of these dangerous and discriminatory programs.” The Canary spoke to Data Justice Lab researcher Fieke Jansen who specialises in data-driven police operations. Jansen explained that pre-crime, or ‘predictive policing’ has a couple of different strands:

    with predictive policing, you have two different strands. So the first is location policing. It looks at where crime is most likely to occur in the near future. And the other one is predictive identification which is seeing who is potentially most likely to be engaged in a certain criminal activity in the near future.

    Jansen says that police budget cuts in the UK have meant a lot of predictive policing models stop and start frequently. For example, Kent Police ran, and ultimately halted their use of crime prediction strategies. Jansen explains that a major problem police forces have is that:

    you need a certain volume of police data to actually even make some predictions, and then you can question what the validity of these predictions are.

    So, how sophisticated is it? Jansen explains that the level of sophistication varies:

    It depends a little bit how sophisticated they are like the gang matrix, or what people have told me is basically the use of Excel sheets. There’s nothing technically sophisticated about it. But then the staff, what they’re doing in the West Midlands Police is that they have a data insight team, and they’re trying out different machine learning models to predict known offenders – so it’s not everybody, it’s those who are already known. And they try to predict the likelihood that they will escalate from low harm to high.

    Why is it harmful?

    Organisations like Liberty have already made it clear that crime prediction tactics rely on existing discrimination and bias. They are an increase of policing in already police-heavy areas that make communities feel unsafe. We asked Jansen about the impact predictive policing has:

    I think maybe the anti-discrimination movements said it the best, that this is just another tool in the repertoire of action that the police already have to target certain communities and control them. Because when you look across the board about how all this technology is used, it’s always applied on a certain criminal offence and not on others. So it’s never used on white collar crime, for example, always used on others.

    And as Sofia Lyall explained in Prospect:

    Geolitica [used by the Met and Kent police] perpetuates racial and class discrimination by proxy. As people from BAME communities are disproportionately more likely to be arrested, the algorithm wrongly assumes that the areas in which they live are areas where there is more crime—where what is considered “criminal” has an intentionally narrow scope. If the data also accounted for locations where white collar crime was committed, the algorithm would advise police officers to patrol different locations

    Predictive policing models are not used for white collar crime. Yet as a Labour policy review states, not only is white collar crime “not victimless”, it costs the economy £73bn a year. It further sets out that:

    Victims often struggle to get redress. Researchers at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Fraud studies estimate that only 1.5 per cent of frauds are ever reported and only 0.4 per cent ever receive a criminal sanction.

    So it becomes a matter of priorities as Jansen points out:

    I think the real harm lies in the fact that it is obfuscated…these larger questions, like ‘why are we focusing on this rather than other crime’, for example are not being asked. A lot of the discussion is now skewed to data harms, ethics of algorithms, things like this, we are no longer talking about how policing is actually used to control the lower classes of society With civil society funding, who gets a seat on the table?

    Hidden questions

    Jansen explains that while there are certainly questions to ask about data ethics, privacy, and surveillance, some questions are not asked as often:

    I do think the question that hardly ever gets asked is [could] this money have been spent on something else? Education, training within the police, it could have also been spent on health care, and children and so on. So, it’s a question of prioritisation and resources at the state level, but also at a policing level.

    Policy decisions are decisive in providing a roadmap for policing that happens on the ground. The consultation on the Official Secrets Act is a marker of dangers for civil liberties and the right to privacy. Predictive policing relies on surveillance in order to work. Surveillance requires infringing on civil liberties.  However, in addition to this it’s also a choice from governments to waste money on data and technology rather than spending money on a universal basic income, healthcare, childcare, and a strong welfare state. Properly funding those avenues would be a stronger foundation on which to tackle crime – instead of targeting and surveilling the most disadvantaged.

    Featured image via Unsplash/ev

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The best-selling Irish novelist Sally Rooney is openly shunning Israel after recent reports from human rights groups warned that Israel practices apartheid, systematically oppressing Palestinians under its rule.

    But while Israel risks becoming a pariah among some cultural producers, it is being aggressively embraced by globe-spanning corporations like Amazon and Google – among the wealthiest companies in history.

    The two tech giants are not just lining up to do business with Israel. They are actively working to build and improve the technological infrastructure Israel needs to surveil Palestinians and confine them to the ghettos Israel’s army has created for them.

    Through their collaboration on Israel’s Project Nimbus, both companies are helping to remove any pressure on Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and are instead becoming partners in Israeli apartheid.

    Now workers for both companies are speaking out – most of them anonymously for fear of what they call “retaliation.”

    This month some 400 employees of the two companies published a letter in The Guardian newspaper warning that Amazon and Google were contracted to supply “dangerous technology” to the Israeli military and government that would make Israel’s rule over Palestinians “even crueler and deadlier.”

    Under wraps

    The $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus awarded earlier this year means the two tech firms are to build data centers in Israel on behalf of the Israeli military and government.

    Senior staff will need Israeli security clearance to work on the project.

    In a sign of how aware Israel is of the potential backlash against Amazon and Google’s involvement, the contract bars the tech corporations from withdrawing due to pressure from either employees or the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The terms of the contracts are also being kept under wraps to prevent scrutiny.

    The tech giants’ wish to avoid publicity is understandable. Each pays lip service to ethical business practices. Google claims that firms “can make money without doing evil,” while Amazon’s “leadership principles” state a commitment to “make better, do better and be better.”

    Providing Israel with the technological tools to better enforce both its belligerent military occupation and its apartheid policies privileging Jews over Palestinians looks suspiciously like making a lot of money from colluding with evil.

    In the words of the whistleblowing staff, Amazon and Google’s collaboration allows “further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.”

    Neither Amazon nor Google responded to a request for comment on the concerns raised in the letter.

    Enforce occupation

    Two employees, Gabriel Schubiner, a software engineer at Google, and Bathool Syed, a content strategist at Amazon, went public on NBC’s website shortly after publication of the letter in The Guardian.

    They gave examples of how Israel would be able to use Amazon and Google’s computer services to help enforce the occupation. Data would be used to identify Palestinian homes for demolition, in what are often moves towards land clearances by Israel to build or expand illegal settlements.

    And the information collected and stored on the servers would guide attacks on built-up areas in Gaza, which Israel has been blockading for the past 15 years. In previous military campaigns, Israel has bombed Palestinian hospitals, schools and universities.

    Amazon and Google’s servers will also assist Israel’s Iron Dome missile interception system, which has helped Israel neutralize rockets from Gaza so that it can maintain an enforced quiet from Palestinians as it keeps them caged and imposes a starvation diet for the enclave’s inhabitants.

    The two employees also noted that Amazon and Google will be directly implicated in Israel’s wider apartheid policies of the kind criticized earlier in the year by human rights groups, including the Israeli occupation watchdog B’Tselem.

    Nimbus will serve the Israel Lands Authority, which not only allocates lands for illegal settlements but oversees discriminatory policies in land allocation inside Israel that openly privilege Jews over the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian natives.

    Israel claims these so-called Israeli Arabs are equal citizens but they suffer systematic discrimination, as B’Tselem and the New York-based Human Rights Watch have highlighted.

    “Data crossroads”

    Amazon and Google have ignored previous calls from staff to prioritize Palestinian rights over increased profits from colluding in Israel’s war economy.

    In May many hundreds – again anonymously – urged both companies to sever their ties to the Israeli military shortly after it killed almost 260 Palestinians, including more than 60 children, in an attack on besieged Gaza.

    Figures published this month demonstrated Israel’s central place in the global digital economy. Despite its tiny size, Israel’s share of hi-tech investments now amounts to a third of those made in European countries.

    Israel has particularly benefited from the growing demand in the West for its surveillance technologies, cyber weapons and developments in militarized artificial intelligence. The Israeli military and offshoot startups launched by retired soldiers have a competitive edge, claiming that their technologies have been “battle proven” on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

    According to reports in local media, Israel is poised to become a “global data crossroads.” In addition to Amazon and Google, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are all expected to build server farms in Israel to cash in on the greater integration of digital and military technologies.

    The critical role of Israel in hi-tech – from its Intel chip plant to firms like AnyVision and Onavo that offer specialist surveillance, facial recognition and data-mining technologies – means no one can afford to fall out with Israel.

    Google and Facebook have already faced criticisms for their work with Israel censoring Palestinians on social media or making them invisible on online maps.

    Profits galore

    The anonymous staff signing the letter to Amazon and Google sound nostalgic for the days when, they write, the technology they built was designed “to serve and uplift people everywhere.”

    But the reality is that tech firms like Amazon and Google have long moved past simple online services such as helping us to buy a book or search for a recipe. The drive for profits, the need to keep competitors at bay and an incentive to avoid state regulation mean they have become key players assisting the “national security state.”

    As well as its notorious union-busting initiatives, Amazon has increased the surveillance powers of US state and local police forces and of immigration services that have been harshly criticized for separating asylum-seeking families at the US-Mexico border.

    From early on, Google partnered with, or received money from, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon and the US State Department.

    The 400 or so anonymous employees still hope they can replicate previous victories that ended the tech corporations’ complicity in oppression and military aggression.

    In 2019 Google pulled out of Project Dragonfly, intended to help China censor its population’s online searches. And the year before it ditched Project Maven to assist the Pentagon with drone assassinations.

    But China was an official enemy, and the Pentagon is still pressing ahead with the drone project, reportedly aided by firms backed by investment funds owned by Google parent Alphabet and a startup tied to a former Google executive, among others, to do the work Google itself had to abandon.

    Getting either Amazon or Google to honor their public commitments to ethical behavior by withdrawing from Project Nimbus may prove much harder – and not only because of the contractual obligations Israel has insisted on.

    Israel has become too integral to the global surveillance and war industries for any tech giant to risk antagonizing it. With profits galore to be derived from closer collaboration with the military industrial complex, the pressure will be on to forge closer bonds with Israel, whatever its human rights record.

    And with the Israel lobby deeply ensconced in Western capitals, the tech corporations will not wish to risk the reputational damage of being tarred as anti-Semitic for boycotting Israel.

    Pressure may be mounting on many companies to distance themselves from Israel over its occupation and apartheid policies. But for Amazon and Google it is those very practices of occupation and apartheid that are a tech seam waiting to be mined.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Amazon and Google: Partners in Israeli Apartheid first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Authorities using predictive policing and human surveillance on Muslims in Xinjiang, thinktank says

    Authorities in the Chinese region of Xinjiang are using predictive policing and human surveillance to gather “micro clues” about Uyghurs and empower neighbourhood informants to ensure compliance at every level of society, according to a report.

    The research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) thinktank detailed Xinjiang authorities’ expansive use of grassroots committees, integrated with China’s extensive surveillance technology, to police their Uyghur neighbours’ movements – and emotions.

    Continue reading…

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

  • At least 51 times last summer, drug enforcement agents were asked to surveil Americans engaged in First Amendment activities stemming from the backlash over Floyd’s murder. The requests to the DEA arrived from all over the country and came from all levels of government. Once approved, they resulted in a nationwide deployment of agency assets on the ground and in the air.

    The post DEA Went Undercover To Infiltrate A Vigil For George Floyd appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The issues most important to Michel Foucault have moved from the margins to become major preoccupations of political life. But what did Foucault actually teach?

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.

    We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.

    Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.

    Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.

    Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.

    People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.

    People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.

    People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.

    People think they are free because the system lets them elect “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and AOC, even though those “progressives” always stop short when it comes time to challenge real power.

    People spent generations arguing for the right to own guns so they can defend themselves against tyranny while the iron bars of tyranny were quietly being constructed around them the entire time.

    Western leftists are so busy arguing with each other that they haven’t noticed that the left has been so effectively sabotaged, hijacked, subverted and neutered in our society that it is now little more than a glorified group chat.

    Silicon Valley megacorporations have intimate relationships with powerful government agencies and those agencies are almost certainly harvesting everyone’s data to fine-tune their propaganda operations on the public based on what our information tells them about our thoughts and feelings on subjects relevant to status quo power agendas.

    If our information is valuable enough to make Facebook into a trillion-dollar company via surveillance capitalism, we may be absolutely certain that our information is also valuable enough for opaque government agencies to work on gathering our information for its own purposes.

    The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for more than a century, which is an eternity when you think of all the advances in other military technologies that have been achieved during that time. They’re only getting better and better at this, and now the internet has given them unprecedented access to the inner workings of our collective psychology.

    A wife who’s been psychologically dominated into doing everything her husband wants doesn’t notice she’s being abused, because she isn’t being beaten into doing those things; she thinks she’s doing what she wants to do.

    A population that’s been psychologically dominated into doing everything the powerful want doesn’t notice that it is being tyrannized, because it isn’t being forced to do those things at gunpoint; people think they are doing what they want to do.

    None of the people warning of Orwellian dystopia get it: we’re already there. We’re already marching in perfect alignment with what our rulers desire for us. We just haven’t noticed because we’re still able to eat McDonald’s and watch internet porn.

    They’re still tightening the bolts in various ways to make sure we don’t escape our prison, but make no mistake: those prison walls are already fully constructed, and have been for a while now.

    The walls aren’t physical; the chains are affixed to our minds. But what is the functional difference between a populace which obeys the powerful because it is forced to and a populace which obeys the powerful because it was manipulated into wanting to?

    We are trapped. We are checkmated. At least, as long as our minds continue to operate in a way that can be easily manipulated.

    It is possible that humanity can collectively break free from this propaganda-induced trance by means of a mass-scale psychological transformation out of our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative, and there are some signs that such a transformation may be on its way.

    Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; every species comes to a point where it either makes the adaptations necessary for its survival or it doesn’t. As the powerful use the chains around our minds to march us all toward an existential cliff’s edge of ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship, we’re about to find out which one we are.

    ___________________

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    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?

    First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.

    In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and this era did end in the 1970s. It is also true the heyday of uncontested US world and corporate neoliberal supremacy is over, its zenith being the decade of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, looming on the horizon is China, with the US empire and its subordinate imperial allies (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy) unable to thwart its rise this century, even more than when China stood up in 1949.

    Yet the US imperial system still maintains decisive economic and political dominance, cultural and ideological hegemony, backed by tremendous military muscle. If US ruling class power were in decline, why have there been no socialist revolutions ­­­− the overturning of capitalist rule ­­­− in almost half a century? What would the world look like if the US lacked the muscle to be world cop?

    Imperialism continually faces crises; this is inherent to their system. The question is: which class takes advantage of these crises to advance their interests, the corporate capitalist class or the working class and its allies at home and abroad. In the recent decades, capitalist crises have resulted in setbacks for our class, and a steady worsening of our conditions of life.

    Previous proponents of US empire decline have predicted its demise with an expanding Communist bloc, then Germany and Japan with their supposedly more efficient capitalist production methods, then the European Union encompassing most of Western Europe into a supra-national entity, then the Asian Tigers, and then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). All challenges turned out to be wishful thinking. Now the proponents of decline expect China itself will soon supplant US dominion.  We explore a number of the economic, political, and military difficulties the US empire confronts in its role as world cop.

    Imperial Decline or Adjustments in Methods of Rule?

    A common misconception among believers of US ruling class demise holds that imperial failure to succeed in some particular aim signifies imperial weakening. Examples of setbacks include Afghanistan, the failure to block North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, catastrophic mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and seeming inability to reign in the mammoth US national debt. However, throughout history, successful maintenance of imperial hegemony has never precluded absence of terrible setbacks and defeats. Most importantly, the fundamental question arising from a setback is which class learns to advance its interests more effectively, the imperial overlords or the oppressed.

    The US rulers, as with other imperial nations, have proven adept at engineering more effective methods of control from crises, as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine illustrates. For instance, in the mid-20th century the imperial powers were forced to relinquish direct political governance of their colonial empires, often due to costly wars. Until after World War II, the Western nations owned outright most of Africa and much of Asia. Yet this new Third World political independence did not herald the end of imperial rule over their former colonies. The imperialists simply readjusted their domination through a neocolonial setup and continued to loot these countries, such as siphoning off over $1 trillion  every year since 2005 just through tax havens.

    Likewise, for seven decades the imperial ruling classes endured repeated defeats attempting to overturn the seemingly invincible Russian revolution. But they only needed to succeed one time, using a new strategy, to emerge victorious.

    A third example, the growing US national deficit due to the cost of the war on Vietnam forced Nixon to no longer peg the value of the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. After World War II, the US had imposed the dollar as the international reserve currency, fixed at this exchange rate.  Today gold is $1806 an ounce, yet the dollar continues as the world reserve currency. The US rulers resolved their crisis by readjusting the manner their dollar reigned in international markets.

    A fourth example is the world historic defeat dealt the empire at the hands of the Vietnamese. Yet Vietnam today poses no challenge to US supremacy, in sharp contrast to 50 years ago.

    The US ruling class is well versed in the lessons gained from centuries of Western imperial supremacy. They have repeatedly demonstrated that the no longer effective methods of world control can be updated.  Bankruptcy in methods of rule may not signify a decline, but only the need for a reset, allowing the domination to continue.

    Part 1:  US Economic and Financial Strength

    Decline in US Share of World Production

    A central element of the waning US empire argument comes from the unparalleled economic rise of China. As a productive powerhouse, the US has been losing ground. As of 2019, before the COVID year reduced it further, the US share of world manufacturing amounted to 16.8%, while China was number one, at 28.7%.

    Similarly, the US Gross Domestic Product itself (GDP) slipped from 40% of the world economy in 1960 to 24% in 2019. GDP is the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country.

    When GDP is measured by the world reserve currency, the dollar, the US ranks first, at $21 trillion, with China number two at $14.7 trillion. Using the Purchasing Power Parity measure of GDP,  which measures economic output in terms of a nation’s own prices, China’s GDP surpasses the US at $24.16 trillion. By either measure, a steady US erosion over time is evident, particularly in relation to China, and a major concern for the US bosses.

    Worsening US balance of trade reflects this decline. In 1971 the US had a negative balance of trade (the value of imports greater than the value of exports) for the first time in 78 years. Since then, the value of exports has exceeded that of imports only two times, in 1973 and 1975. From 2003 on, the US has been running an annual trade deficit of $500 billion or more. To date the US rulers “pay” for this by creating dollars out of thin air.

    Ballooning US National Debt

    The ballooning US national debt is considered another indicator of US imperial demise. The US debt clock puts the national debt at $28.5 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) numbers, the US debt is 118% of the GDP, near a historic high point, up from 79.2% at the end of 2019.

    The international reserves of the imperialist nations do not even cover 2% of their foreign debt. In contrast, China tops the list with the largest international reserves, which covers 153% of its foreign debt.

    However, today US debt as a percent of GDP is lower than in World War II, at the height of US economic supremacy. Germany’s debt to GDP ratio is 72%. Japan’s is 264%, making its debt over two and a half times the size of the country’s GDP. China’s is 66%.

    Yet a key concern with the ballooning national debt − inflation caused by creating money backed with no corresponding increase in production − hasn’t been a problem in any of these countries, not even Japan. The immediate issue with debt is not its size in trillions of dollars, but the degree annual economic growth exceeds the annual interest payment on the debt.

    In the US, this payout costs almost $400 billion a year, 1.9% of GDP. Federal Reserve Board president Powell stated: “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future.” Former IMF chief economist and president of the American Economic Association, Olivier Blanchard likewise declared: “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost” given that “the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception.” According to these ruling class economists, the huge size of the US national debt presents no economic difficulty for their bosses.

    Technological Patents

    Patents are an indicator of a country’s technological progress because they reflect the creation and dissemination of knowledge in productive activities. Today China is on the technological cutting edge in wind power, solar power, online payments, digital currencies, artificial intelligence (such as facial recognition), quantum computing, satellites and space exploration, 5G and 6G, drones, and ultra-high voltage power transmission. In 2019, China ended the US reign as the leading filer of international patents, a position previously held by the US every year since the UN World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent Cooperation Treaty System began in 1978.

    The failure of the US rulers to thwart China’s scientific and technological advances threatens the preeminence the US holds on technological innovation. Rents from the US corner on intellectual property is a major contributor to the US economy. The drastic measures the US has taken against Huawei exemplify the anxiety of the empire’s rulers.

    US technological superiority is now being challenged. Yet, as John Ross points out, “Even using PPP measures, the US possesses overall technological superiority compared to China…. the level of productivity of the US economy is more than three times that of China.”1

    The US Still Controls the Global Financial Network

    While the world share of US manufacturing and exports has shrunk, the US overlords still reign over the world financial order. A pillar of their world primacy lies in the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency,” an innocuous term referring to US sway over the global financial and trade structure, including international banking networks, such as the World Bank and the IMF.

    Following the 1971 end of the dollar’s $35 an ounce peg to gold, Nixon engineered deals with the Middle East oil exporting regimes, guaranteeing them military support on condition they sell their oil exclusively in dollars. This gave a compelling new reason for foreign governments and banks to hold dollars. The US could now flood international markets with dollars regardless of the amount of gold it held. Today, most of the world’s currencies remain pegged directly or indirectly to the dollar.

    To facilitate growing international trade, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was created in 1973. SWIFT is a payment and transaction network used by international banks to monitor and process purchases and payments by individuals, companies, banks, and governments. Dominated by the US, it grants the country even greater mastery over world trade and financial markets. Here, China poses no challenge to US supremacy.

    After the euro became established, the percent of world reserves held in US dollars diminished from the 71% share it held in 2001. Since 2003, the dollar has kept the principal share, fluctuating in the 60-65% range. Today, the percent of world nations’ currency reserves held in US dollars amounts to $7 trillion, 59.5% of international currency reserves.

    In 2021 the dollar’s share of total foreign currency reserves is actually greater than in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Because only a few reserve currencies are accepted in international trade, countries are not free to trade their goods in their own money. Rather, over 90% of nations’ imports and exports requires use of the dollar, the euro, or the currencies of other imperial states. The Chinese RMB, in contrast, constitutes merely 2.4% of international reserves, ranking China on the level of Canada. The US continues as the superpower in world currency reserves, while China is a marginal player.

    The US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency

    The US maintains preeminence because banks, governments and working peoples around the world regards US dollar as the safest, most reliable, and accepted currency to hold their savings.

    A capitalist economic crisis, even when caused by the US itself, as in 2008, actually increases demand for the dollar, since the dollar is still viewed as the safe haven. People expect the dollar to be the currency most likely to retain its value in periods of uncertainty. Ironically, an economic crisis precipitated by the US results in money flooding into dollar assets, keeping world demand for dollars high. The 2008-09 crisis enabled the ruling class to advance their domination over working people, fleecing us of hundreds of billions of dollars.

    SWIFT data show that China’s RMB plays a minor role in world trade transactions.  While China has become the world exporter, its currency was used in merely 1.9% of  international payments, versus 38% for the US dollar, with 77% of transactions in the dollar or euro. This means almost all China’s own imports and exports are not traded in Chinese currency, but in that of the US and its subordinates.

    Being the leading force in SWIFT gives the US a powerful weapon. The US rulers can target countries it seeks to overthrow (such as Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Iran) with sanctions declared illegal by the United Nations. SWIFT enables the US rulers to prevent those countries’ access to their overseas bank accounts, blocks their access to international trade as well as loans from the World Bank, the IMF and most international banks. The US uses its authority in the World Trade Organization to prevent countries like Venezuela from demanding the WTO punish the US for disrupting Venezuela’s legitimate trade by means of these sanctions.

    Arguments that China and Russia are abandoning the dollar point out that, while in 2015 approximately 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in dollars, by spring 2020 the figure had dropped to 46%, with 24% of the trade in their own currencies. This shows some increasing independence, yet almost twice as much China-Russia trade still takes place in the dollar rather than in their own money. Further, their moves from the dollar have been in reaction to US imposed sanctions and tariffs, forcing them off the dollar, not from their own choice to cast aside the dollar as the international currency.

    If China and Russia had the means to create a new world economic order they could withdraw their over $1.1 trillion and $123 billion invested in US Treasury bonds and use the funds to start their own international financial structure.

    That China pegs the RMB to the dollar, rather than the dollar pegged to the RMB, also indicates the economic power relations between China and the US. China has expressed unease about the US potential to cut China off from the SWIFT network. Zhou Li, a spokesperson for China’s Communist Party, urged his party’s leaders to prepare for decoupling from the dollar, because the US dollar “has us by the throat… By taking advantage of the dollar’s global monopoly position in the financial sector, the US will pose an increasingly severe threat to China’s further development.”

    While China has displaced the US as the primary productive workhouse of the world, it remains far from displacing the US as the world financial center. The size of China’s economy has not translated into a matching economic power.

    Part 2: Military and Ideological Forms of Domination

    The US regards as its Manifest Destiny to rule the world. The US bosses equate their national security interests with global security interests; no place or issue is insignificant. The US sees its role as defending the world capitalist order even if narrow US interests are not immediately and practically involved.

    The Question of a US Military Decline

    The second central element of the waning US empire argument is based on the US armed forces failures in the Middle East wars. However, they overlook that the US rulers suffered more stinging defeats in Korea 70 years ago and Vietnam 50 years ago, when the US was considered at the height of its supremacy. While over 7000 US soldiers and 8000 “contractors,” a code word for mercenaries, have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is much smaller than the 41,300 troops killed in Korea, or the 58,000 in Vietnam. Although in wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the US ruling class could not achieve its aims, these peoples’ anti-imperial struggles were derailed, a US key objective. To the extent the peoples of these countries “won,” they inherited a country in ruins.

    Likewise, the rising British empire suffered defeats at the hands of the US in 1783 and 1814, but this had little impact on 19th century British global ascendancy.

    Save Iraq in 1991, the US has not won a war since World War II. Yet even in its heyday, the US military did not take on and defeat another major power without considerable outside aid. Spain was mostly defeated in Cuba and the Philippines before the US attacked. The US entered World War I after the other fighting forces were reaching exhaustion. In World War II, the Soviet Red Army broke the back of the German Wehrmacht, not the US. Only against Japan did the US military play a key role in crushing an imperial rival, though even here, the bulk of Japanese troops were tied down fighting the Chinese.

    While today, the US military is reluctant about engaging in a full-scale land war, this has been mostly the case for the whole 20th century before any alleged imperial deterioration. Previously, the US rulers proved adept at not entering a war until it could emerge on top once the wars ended.

    The “Vietnam syndrome,” code word for the US people’s opposition to fighting wars to defend the corporate world order, continues to haunt and impede the US rulers when they consider new military aggressions. This “syndrome,” which Bush Sr boasted had been overcome, has only deepened as result of the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. Yet the corporate class took advantage of these wars to loot trillions from public funds, with working people to pay the bill.

    The US is spending over a trillion dollars to “upgrade” a nuclear capacity which could wipe out life on the planet.  Even if US military capacity were diminishing in some areas, this is immaterial so long as the US still can, with a push of the button, annihilate all it considers opponents, even if this means a likely mutually assured destruction. The US also possesses similarly dangerous arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. It is not rational to think the US rulers spend mind-boggling sums of money on this weaponry but will not use them again when considered necessary to preserve their supremacy.

    The US empire’s military dominion remains firmly in place around the world. Peoples’ struggles to close US military bases have met with little success. US ruling class de facto military occupations overseas continue through its over 800 bases in over 160 countries. These constitute 95% of the world’s total foreign military bases.

    To date, if there has been any lessening of US military destructive capacity, no new armed forces or uprisings have dared to take advantage of this. If some national force considered it possible to break out of the US world jailhouse, we would be seeing that.

    Hybrid Warfare: US Regime-Change Tools Besides Military Intervention

    Military victory is not necessary for the US rulers to keep “insubordinate” countries in line. It suffices for the US to leave in ruins their attempts to build political and economic systems that prioritize national sovereignty over US dictates.

    When incapable of overturning a potential “threat of a good example” through military invasion, the US may engineer palace coups. Since 2000, it has succeeded in engineering coups in Honduras, Bolivia, Georgia, and Haiti, to name a few.

    Alternatives to fomenting a military coup include the US conducting lawfare to overturn governments, as seen in Paraguay and Brazil. The US ruling class also skillfully co-opts “color revolutions,” as seen in the Arab Spring and in the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Worldwide, the US regularly violates the sovereignty of nations through its regime-change agencies such as the CIA, USAID, and NED.

    Besides invasions, coups, lawfare, election interference, and color revolutions, the US relies on its command over the global financial system and the subservience of other imperialist nations. This enables the US overlords to impose crippling sanctions and blockades on countries that assert their national sovereignty. The blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Syria constitute a boot on their neck, which have only become more severe the more these peoples valiantly defend their independence.

    Condemnation of these blockades by working people and nations worldwide has yet to have material effect in constraining this imperial cruelty against whole peoples. Rather than a decline of the US empire’s ability to thwart another country’s right to determine their own future, there have been changes in method, from overtly militaristic to more covert hybrid warfare. Both are brutal and effective means of regime change.

    US-First World Ideological Hegemony

    The corporate leaders of the West wield world dominion over the international media, including news services, social media, and advertising. Their Coke and Disney characters, for instance, have penetrated even the remotest corners of the world. Today most of the world’s viewers of the news are fed a version of the news through media stage-managed by the US and its subordinate allies. In addition, there are almost 4 billion social media users in the world, with six social media companies having more than one billion users. China owns just one of these. Only the US and its subordinates have world reach in their control of news and social media, while China does not.

    Ramon Labanino, one of the Cuban 5, illustrated how the US rulers use their media to foment the July 12 regime change operation in Cuba:

    We are in the presence of an international media dictatorship, the big media are in the hands of imperialism and now the social networks and the alternative media also use them in a masterful way. They have the capacity, through data engineering, bots, to replicate a tweet millions of times, which is what they have done against Cuba. A ruthless attack on social networks and in the media to show a Cuba that is not real. On the other hand, we have an invasion in our networks to disarticulate our computer systems so that even we cannot respond to the lies. The interesting thing is the double purpose, not only that they attack us, but then we cannot defend ourselves because the media belong to them… Within the CIA, for example, they have a special operations group that is in charge of cyber attacks of this type and there is a group called the Political Action Group that organizes, structures and directs this type of attack.

    Worldwide use of media disinformation and news spin plays a central role in preserving US primacy and acceptance of its propaganda. As Covert Action Magazine reported:

    United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.

    The ruling class media’s effective massaging of what is called “news” has penetrated and disoriented many anti-war forces. This illustrates the appalling collapse of a world anti-war opposition that almost 20 years ago had been called “the new superpower,” not some decline of the US as world cop. Corporate media operations play a role comparable to military might in perpetuating US global control.

    Part 3: The Threat US Rulers Perceive in China

    Secretary of State Blinken spelled it out:

    China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.

    China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Washington’s view that the international system operates primarily to advance US corporate interests:

    The ‘rules-based order’ claimed by the US…refers to rules set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules,’ which will only be rejected by the whole world.

    Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said:

    The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal…They are promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries.

    The Challenge China Presents to US Rulers Differs from that of the Soviet Union

    China’s development poses a threat to imperialist hegemony different from the former Soviet bloc. China competes in the world markets run by the Western nations, slowly supplanting their control. China’s economic performance, 70 years after its revolution, has been unprecedented in world history, even compared to the First World countries. In contrast, the Soviet economy after 70 years was faltering.

    China does not provide the economic and military protection for nations striving to build a new society the way the Soviet Union had. The importance of the Communist bloc as a force constraining the US was immense and is underappreciated. The Communist bloc generally allied itself with anti-imperialist forces, encouraging Third World national liberation struggles as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Communist bloc’s exemplary social programs also prompted the rise of social-democratic welfare state regimes (e.g., Sweden) in the capitalist West to circumvent possible socialist revolution.

    Now, with no Soviet Union and its allies to extend international solidarity assistance to oppressed peoples and nations, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are much more on their own to defend themselves against US military maneuvers and blockades.

    As John Ross points out, China is capable of slowly supplanting US-First World power over a long period of time, but in no position to replace these imperial states as world hegemon, nor does it desire to do so. US products are being driven out by China’s cheaper high-quality products and China’s more equitable “win-win” business arrangements with other countries, offering the opportunity for Third World countries to develop. However, China cannot displace the US in the world financial system, where the US and its allies retain overwhelming control.

    The US has proven incapable of impeding China from becoming an independent world force. No matter the tariffs and sanctions placed on China, they have had little impact. Yet, the US has caused China to digress from its socialist planned economy, through US corporations and consumerist values penetrating the Chinese system.

    Part 4:  The World if the US were in Decline

    Revolutions on the International Stage

    A weakened US imperialism would encourage peoples and nations to “seize the time” and score significant gains against this overlord’s hold on their countries. Yet since shortly after 1975, with the victories in Vietnam and Laos, a drought in socialist revolutions has persisted for almost half a century. If the US empire were in decline, we would find it handicapped in countering victorious socialist revolutions. However, the opposite has been the case, with the US rulers consolidating their hegemony over the world.

    This contrasts with the 40-year period between 1917 and 1959, when socialist revolutions occurred in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, eleven countries across eastern Europe, and Cuba. These took place in the era of US rise, not decline. During this period, the US empire had to confront even greater challenges to its dictates than presented by today’s China and Russia in the form of the world Communist bloc, associated parties in capitalist countries, and the national liberation movements.

    During the period of alleged US imperial demise, it has been socialist revolution that experienced catastrophic defeats. In the last 30 years, the struggle for socialist revolution has gone sharply in reverse, with the US and its subordinates not only blocking successful revolutions but overturning socialism in most of the former Communist sphere. The last three decades has witnessed greater consolidation of imperial supremacy over the world, not a deterioration.

    The socialist revolutions that continue − North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba − have all had to backtrack and reintroduce private enterprise and capitalist relations of production.  North Korea has allowed the growth of private markets; Cuba relies heavily on the Western tourist market. They have this forced upon them to survive more effectively in the present world neoliberal climate.

    A victorious socialist revolution, even a much more limited anti-neoliberal revolution2 , requires a nation to stand up to the imperial vengeance that enforces neo-colonial subjugation. Small countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, have established political and some economic independence, but they have been unable to significantly advance against crushing blockades and US-backed coups in order to create developed economies. Historically, the only countries that have effectively broken with dependency and developed independently based on their own resources have been the Soviet Union and China.

    Raul Castro made clear this world primacy of the US neoliberal empire:

    In many cases, governments [including the subsidiary imperial ones] do not even have the capacity to enforce their sovereign prerogatives over the actions of national entities based in their own territories, as these are often docilely subordinated to Washington, as if we were living in a world subjugated by the unipolar power of the United States. This is a phenomenon that is expressed with particular impact in the financial sector, with national banks of several countries giving a US administration’s stipulations priority over the political decisions of their own governments.

    A test of the US overlords’ decline can be measured in the struggle against US economic warfare in the form of sanctions. To date, the US can arm twist most countries besides China and Russia into abiding by its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The US rulers still possess the power and self-assurance to ignore United Nations resolutions against economic warfare, including the UN General Assembly’s annual condemnation of the US blockade on Cuba. The peoples and nations of the world cannot make the US rulers pay a price for this warfare.

    Domestic Struggles by the Working Class and its Allies that Shake the System

    If the US empire were weakened, our working class could be winning strikes and union organizing drives against a capitalist class on the defensive. But the working class remains either quiescent, its struggles derailed, or most strikes settled by limiting the degree of boss takebacks. The 1997 UPS and 2016 Verizon strike were two that heralded important gains for workers. So far, however, the weakening class at home is not the corporate bosses, but the working class and its allies.

    The workers movement has not even succeeded in gaining a national $15 minimum wage. The US rulers can spend over $900 billion a year on its war machine even during a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000, amid deteriorating standard of living  − no national health care, no quality free education, no raising of the minimum wage − without angry mass protests. This money could be spent on actual national security at home: housing for the homeless, eliminating poverty, countering global warming, jobs programs, and effectively handling the pandemic as China has (with only two deaths since May 2020). Instead, just in the Pentagon budget, nearly a trillion dollars a year of our money is a welfare handout to corporations to maintain their rule over the world. This overwhelming imperial reign over our workers’ movement signifies a degeneration in our working class organizations, not in the corporate overlords.

    A weakened empire would provide opportunities for working class victories, re-allocating national wealth in their favor. Instead, we live in a new Gilded Age, with growing impoverishment of our class as the corporate heads keep grabbing greater shares of our national wealth. Americans for Tax Fairness points out:

    America’s 719 billionaires held over four times more wealth ($4.56 trillion) than all the roughly 165 million Americans in society’s bottom half ($1.01 trillion), according to Federal Reserve Board data. In 1990, the situation was reversed — billionaires were worth $240 billion and the bottom 50% had $380 billion in collective wealth.

    US billionaire wealth increased 19-fold over the last 31 years, with the combined wealth of 713 billionaires surging by $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, one-third of their wealth gains since 1990.

    This scandalous appropriation of working people’s wealth by less than one thousand bosses at the top without causing mass indignation and working class fightback, encapsules the present power relations between the two contending classes.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect a rise of a militant mass current in the trade unions and the working class committed to the struggle to reverse this trend. Instead, trade unions support corporate governance and their political candidates for office, not even making noise about a labor party.

    With a weakened empire, we would expect the US working people to be turning away from the two corporate parties and building our own labor party as an alternative. In 2016 the US electorate backed two “outsiders,” Bernie Sanders and Trump, in the primaries against the traditional Democratic and Republican candidates, but this movement was co-opted with little difficulty. That the two corporate-owned parties still wield the power to co-opt, if not extinguish, our working class movements, as with the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the Madison trade union protests, the pro-Bernie groundswells in 2016 and 2020, shows the empire’s continued vitality, not deterioration.

    In 2020 most all liberals and lefts capitulated to the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism, under the guise of “fighting fascism.” The “resistance” became the “assistance.” The promising Black Lives Matter movement of summer 2020 became largely absorbed into the Biden campaign a few months later. If the corporate empire were declining, progressive forces and leftist groups would not have bowed to neoliberal politicians and the national security state by climbing on the elect-Biden bandwagon. The 2020 election brought out the highest percent of voters in over a century to vote for one or the other of two neoliberal politicians. This stunning victory for the US ruling class resulted from a stunning surrender by progressive forces. To speak of declining corporate US supremacy in this context is nonsense.

    Likely Indicators of a Demise of US Supremacy

    For all our political lives we have been reading reports of the impending decline of US global supremacy. If just a fraction of these reports were accurate, then surely the presidential executive orders that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Cuba are “unusual and extraordinary threats to the national security of the United States” would have some basis in reality.

    If US corporate dominion were declining, we might see:

    • The long called for democratization of the United Nations and other international bodies with one nation, one vote
    • Social democratic welfare governments would again be supplanting neoliberal regimes
    • Replacement of World Bank, WTO, and IMF with international financial institutions independent of US control
    • Curtailing NATO and other imperialist military alliances
    • End of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency
    • Dismantling of US overseas military bases
    • Emergence of regional blocs independent of the US, replacing the current vassal organizations (e.g., European Union, OAS, Arab League, Organization of African Unity)
    • Nuclear disarmament rather than nuclear escalation
    • Working peoples of the world enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
    • A decline of the allure of US controlled world media culture (e.g., Disney, Hollywood)

    Part 5: Conclusion:  US Decline looks like a Mirage

    Proponents of US decline point to two key indicators: its diminished role in global production and ineffectiveness of the US ruler’s military as world cop. Yet, the US rulers, with the aid of those in the European Union and Japan, maintain world financial control and continue to keep both our country and the world under lock and key.

    The US overlords represent the spokesperson and enforcer of the First World imperial system of looting, while compelling subservience from the other imperial nations. None dare pose as potential imperial rivals to the US, nor challenge it in any substantial manner.

    It is misleading to compare China’s rise to the US alone, since the US represents a bloc of imperial states. To supplant US economic preeminence, China would have to supplant the economic power of this entire bloc. These countries still generate most world production with little prospect this will change. A China-Russia alliance scarcely equals this US controlled First World club.

    To date, each capitalist crisis has only reinforced the US rulers’ dominion as the world financial hub. Just the first half of this year, world investors have poured $900 billion into the safe haven US assets, more than they put into funds in the rest of the world combined. So long as the US capitalists can export their economic downturns to other countries and onto the backs of its own working people, so long as the world turns to the US dollar as the safe haven, decline of US ruling class preeminence is not on the table.

    The last period of imperial weakening occurred from the time of US defeat in Vietnam up to the reimposition of imperial diktat under Reagan and his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher. During this time, working peoples’ victories were achieved across the international stage: Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada; Cuban military solidarity in Angola, Vietnam’s equivalent in Cambodia; revolution in Portugal and in its African colonies, in Zimbabwe, and seeming imminent victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. At home, a rising class struggle current arose in the working class, as in the Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back movement and the militant 110-day coal miners strike, which forced President Carter to back down. This worldwide upsurge against corporate rule ended about 40 years ago, as yet unmatched by new ones.

    Proclamations of a waning US empire portray a wishful thinking bordering on empty bravado. Moreover, a crumbling empire will not lead to its final exit without a massive working peoples’ movement at home to overthrow it. Glen Ford observed that capitalism has lost its legitimacy, especially among the young: “But that doesn’t by itself bring down a system. It is simply a sign that people are not happy. Mass unhappiness may bring down an administration. But it doesn’t necessarily change a system one bit.”

    Capitalism is wracked by crisis – inherent to the system, Marx explained. Yet, as the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath showed, as the Great Depression showed, as Europe in chaos after World War II showed, capitalist crises are no harbinger of its collapse. The question is not how severe the crisis, but which class, capitalist or working class, takes advantage of it to advance their own interests.

    A ruling class crisis allows us to seize the opportunity if our forces are willing to fight, are organized, and are well-led. As Lenin emphasized, “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.” In regards to organization, we are unprepared. Contributing to our lack of effective anti-imperialist organization is our profound disbelief that a serious challenge at home to US ruling class control is even possible.

    Whatever the indications of US deterioration as world superpower, recall that the Roman empire’s decay began around 177 AD. But it did not collapse in the West until 300 years later, in 476, and the eastern half did not collapse for 1000 years after that. Informing a Roman slave or plebe in 200 AD that the boot on their necks was faltering would fall on deaf ears. We are now in a similar situation. The empire will never collapse by itself, even with the engulfing climate catastrophe. Wishful thinking presents a dysfunctional substitute for actual organizing, for preparing people to seize the time when the opening arises.

    1. John Ross, “China and South-South Cooperation in the present global situation,” in China’s Great Road, p. 203.
    2. There is a continuous class struggle between popular forces demanding increased government resources and programs to serve their needs, against corporate power seeking to privatize in corporate hands all such government spending and authority. This unchecked corporate centralization of wealth and power is euphemistically called “neoliberalism.”  An anti-neoliberal revolution places popular forces in political control while economic power remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
    The post Is the US Global Empire Actually in Decline? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • *Military Industrial Complex, or Lawrence Wilkerson’s, Military Industrial Congressional Complex*

    You get a story on the supposed Havana Syndrome, and then you also get the concept of mass psychogenic illness (you know, it’s all in your head, buster, those heart palpitations, the sweats, the throbbing veins, after getting mRNA “vaccinated”) explained, and, well, no huge outrage on these weapons of mass destruction created by USA, Israel, UK, France other shit-holes. None. Yes, of course, China and Russia, they have their directed energy weapons, their lasers, their rail guns.

    As a collective, we just take it up the rear end daily, a thousand times, with these illustrations of the perversion of the inventors (scientists) and the CEOs and their armies of Eichmanns and then their armies of wrench turners and computer motherboard makers to help build these tools of oppression and murder. .

    Get this one here:

    The United Kingdom deployed an American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), in essence, a sound cannon, during the London 2012 Olympics. Products like LRAD represent a shift from military to domestic usage of directed energy weapons, Dawson noted, explaining:

    DEW manufacturers seem to be developing more hand-held versions of what was industrial-scale military weaponry. So they are transitioning from something that was the size of a truck used in Afghanistan or Iraq and turning it into something more like a taser that can be held by a police officer. In fact, the Taser Corporation, as well as other manufacturers of crowd-control weaponry, are listed in the WikiLeaks files as being manufacturers of directed energy weapons.”

    LRADs are used at airports to deter wildlife from runways. But they are also commonly used by law enforcement against protestors, such as at Occupy Oakland, the George Floyd protests, and at the 2017 Women’s March.

     EU police officer deploys an LRAD

    [An EU police officer deploys an LRAD near a popular refugee crossing point on the Greek – Turkish border, May 21, 2021. Giannis Papanikos | AP]

    LRAD focuses a piercing and unbearable noise at those at whom it is pointed, leaving targets dizzy and suffering headaches. It is undoubtedly effective, but also poses a risk to human health. The National Institutes of Health advises that permanent hearing loss can begin when exposed to sounds of more than 85 dB. Yet police LRADs are capable of producing sounds of higher than 150 dB. There are serious concerns that the LRAD will be used liberally and illegally to disperse peaceful demonstrations. This is already happening: in 2017, the city of New York was forced to pay $748,000 to Black Lives Matter protestors targeted with LRAD. The NYPD suspended its use.

    So, look at the thug, with earplugs and fake mask on, while using a weapon turned on refugees. Now if this is not a picture of the Great White Sadistic Race, then, I can’t begin to help you, kind reader.

    Our tax dollars at this murderous work —

    Read Alan MacLeod’s piece here — Havana Syndrome, Directed Energy Weapons, and the New Cold War

    It’s the supplements, stupid!

    So, from illegal and unethical and monstrous weapons against we the people, to the power of the Food and Drug Administration’s prostitutes in the employ of Big Pharma and Big Med:

    Yep, emergency use authorization to approve the universal jabbing of hundreds of bottles of boosters on the wall, that FDA is something else —

    Resveratrol, a plant-derived polyphenol found in grapes, could be eliminated in supplement form like pyridoxamine (B6) was a number of years ago due to an FDA back-channel that lets Big Pharma turn supplements into drugs. If Big Pharma asks the FDA to remove resveratrol, the agency’s job of eliminating these supplements is made much easier if it gets the “mandatory filing” requirement that it wants. We need to fight for major changes in the law and to block this “mandatory list” from ever passing to protect our access to important supplements.

    Resveratrol has been available as a supplement for years. But we know from FDA documents that the agency rejected a “new supplement” notification for resveratrol, stating that resveratrol doesn’t meet the legal definition of a supplement because a drug company started investigating it as a drug in 2001, and the agency has no evidence that resveratrol was sold as a supplement before that date. This means that the drug company could, at any time, petition the FDA to remove resveratrol supplements from the market. This is what happened to pyridoxamine, a form of B6, and it still isn’t available as a supplement even though no drug ever came to market; it could also happen to CBD and l-glutamine.

    So, imagine, all those supplements, all those proven natural elements to keep us out of the medical system. Out of the death chambers of doctors’ offices and mass murder hospitals. You know, this FDA and CDC and NIH group of liars, or in some camps, poison delivery villains:

    Rumble — Expert Testimony provided by Dr. Christina Parks, Ph.D, to the Michigan House of Representatives in hearing on HB 4471. This is an unedited screen recording. This science of viruses, what they can and cannot do, and that is a huge discussion point, though I see this doctor talking to glazed eyes in the Michigan House — Eight minutes to get illuminated so please, watch. This absurdity, using boosters of those mRNA jabs to stop the Delta Variant? Makes zero sense. Listen, watch, and enlighten yourself.

    If there are no national leaders, folks with bully pulpits, with media stages, to really drill down on the absurdity of this country, these trillions lost/stolen of our tax dollars, then the cascading number of stories will continue to come out with no umph, no fanfare, no repercussions.

    The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.

    “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.

    It’s the CIA (and assassinations) Stupid! 

    And so, we get back to the USA, CIA, all those nefarious mutants from the UK, Israel, et al. I was almost five when Dag Hammarskjoild was murdered (1961). This documentary goes around the evidence, gets into the ugly reality of MI6 and CIA and apartheid whites wanting to eradicate the Blacks in, well, Black Africa. Lo and behold, the documentary that looks into the UN chief’s murder exposes another reality — a clandestine group using fake medical doctors and fake clinics to inoculate Blacks (poor, of course) with HIV, to help spread the deadly virus.

    Former President Harry Truman told reporters two days after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death on Sept. 18, 1961 that the U.N. secretary-general  “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”

    The mystery of the second U.N. secretary-general’s death festered until the 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by British researcher Susan Williams, who uncovered new evidence that pointed to the likelihood that U.S., British and South African intelligence had a hand in his death in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia, today’s Zambia. He was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga’s separatist war from the Congo.

    Williams’ findings led to an independent commission that called on the U.N. to reopen its 1962 probe in the killing, which ended with an open verdict. “The possibility … the plane was … forced into descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry,” the commission concluded.

    All roads lead to hell, when it comes to USA, Israel, UK, EU and Canada. Exterminate all the Brutes!

    “I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking and find a freedom to tell this story by any means necessary.” Director Raoul Peck sits down to discuss the creative intentions behind documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes.

    Check out more on Dag over at Consortium News —

    Oh, the truths of the day, around 6 million people dead because of the War on Terror. Six million!

    New Byline Times report which found that

    “at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”

    Image

     

    The post So You Go Deaf at a Protest: *MIC/MICC* at the Helm first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.

    Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate? Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?

    Furthermore, the vaccine passport will effectively be discriminatory since minorities are less likely to get the vaccines. African Americans especially have lower vaccination rates, for good reasons, the US medical establishment experimented on black populations throughout the Cold War and even beyond. It’s not difficult to see the ramifications of bio-digital segregations. One does not need a PhD or medical degree; in fact, these “credentials” seem to blinker one’s view in support of this new form of discrimination.

    In the view of what we might term the technocracy, or perhaps the emerging biosecurity establishment, it is virtuous to separate the “clean” vaxxed from the supposedly disease-carrying, uneducated, lower-classes who won’t take these experimental shots.

    All of the power and money, all the “Science ™” snowballed into an unstoppable corporate/government momentum which shows no signs of letting up. All that propaganda, the deliberate lies about mask efficiency (they don’t work) and vaccine holiness (they don’t prevent transmission) they’ve been shoving down the public’s throats for over a year and a half? Yeah, the nanny-state politico-medical tyrants are not going to give up this narrative without a fight. They are doubling down on the fear and quest for total obedience and control. It suits late-stage capitalism just fine if small and medium sized businesses go under and the excess labor supply of the unemployed are evicted and go hungry. They are extraneous to the monopoly cartels which run the “economy”, which is run by giant tech corporations, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, and the FIRE sector, multinational conglomerates who operate with almost no competition in nearly every industry.

    There is no way to fight back against these abuses of power through the court system. In my opinion, the most rational approach would be to boycott, in any way possible, the corporations and public institutions that are going along with vaccine mandates and passports. Part of this involves the vote with your dollars approach. Hurting the corporate lemmings and technocrat sociopaths in their wallets and lack of tax revenues are the only things they will understand.

    If you were thinking of traveling to Europe, skip France and Italy. Guess what?  If globally millions of tourists suddenly gave the middle finger to these two countries and vacationed elsewhere, the dent in lost revenue and GDP might actually have some effect on the political establishment. In France and Italy citizens are rightly fed up with protests every day against the passports, and many vaccinated people have burned their vaccine papers in solidarity.

    Similarly, if people in the US abstained from traveling to and spending money in NYC and SF, every restaurant owner, museum board, theater, and small business would then put immediate pressure on city, state, and federal politicians to ban vaccine passports, hopefully for good. If millions of people refuse to shop and do business with companies that have mandatory vaccination requirements for their employees, it would also put immense pressure to relent.

    Investors should also divest from corporations that insist on mandating vaccines for employees. It may, in fact, be legal for companies to do so, but it is frankly coercive and is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon, blurring one’s private life and medical choices with public duties, to create a new type of “good citizen”, a biopolitical subject serving capitalism with zero critical thinking skills.

    For those in the workforce facing mandates, such as federal/state public employees and health care workers, if possible it is definitely worth considering if another career/job can be found. If enough teachers, nurses, etc., quit or go on strike against their employee mandates, pressure can be applied and the mandates could potentially be lifted.

    It’s worth pointing out that the goalposts continue to be changed from slowing the pace of transmission to eradicating the virus- from two weeks to flatten the curve (tacitly acknowledging that coronaviruses cannot really be stopped) to mandates for wide swaths of public and private work, as well as military and police presence on the streets of Australia, to name one of the most obvious police state measures. The goalposts are changing to determine our “good citizen” status. Before, one simply had to go along to get along, obey the laws, pay taxes, and keep one’s head down; now, not only are we expected to do and say the right things, but to inject the right experimental drugs into our bodies.

    My humble prediction is the goalposts are going to continue to move. The game is akin to the frogs boiling slowly in the pot; by consenting to our own freedom being curtailed and our own imprisonment, the establishment gets what it wants without having to crack down using excessive force and coercion. The innate desire to have access to public spaces, to go on vacation, will lead many people ignorant of the wider implications to accept these new dystopian measures.  The horizon of getting “back to normal” will recede faster as new variants naturally emerge, as viruses tend to do, and this will continue to be used as a new scare tactic, even as death rates effectively returned to normal four months ago (May of 2021) in the US, and many other countries show no more excess deaths, or none outside normal yearly variations, as well in 2021.

    The virus is now endemic, but the powers that be are going to insist upon using it as a weapon for total control over the population. We’re through the looking-glass, we now have a form of “scientism” which is irrefutable no matter how unsettled the truth really is. Statistics such as death counts from Covid are unreliable, with doctors confessing to listing Covid-19 as the primary cause of death when it’s not- dying “from Covid” is conflated as dying “with Covid”. Deaths from the lockdowns are not seriously considered, even though many scientists are on record stating that the lockdowns led to a large chunk of the excess deaths.

    Frankly, the near future looks pretty bleak for the US and the chances to have an open, honest dialogue about the seriousness of the pandemic, the capitalist world-system which stands to gain by using a 21st century tech-driven shock doctrine, and the police-state that will be built on the back of the panic caused by incessant propaganda. The fault lines are deepening and Democrats yammer to “trust the science” without any understanding themselves, and are willing to demonize anyone who doesn’t get an experimental jab or wear two masks while alone in their car; while Republicans continue to frame the “reopen the economy” debate in terms of those supposedly wonderful job-creating corporations, all the while being willing to sell the average worker out for an extra buck or two. Both parties are more than willing to screw over the poor, minorities, and working classes; if either cared about their citizens’ lives they wouldn’t throw people out into the streets via the mass evictions that are already underway.

    As imperial decline and rot deepen, and the domestic surveillance apparatus pulls its noose tighter against our necks, our best bet to resist these freedom-crushing decrees is to deploy citizen power, mass protests, and coordinated direct action against inhumane vaccine mandates and police-state vaccine passports.

    The post Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Remembering the Last US Retaliation Against Terror

    by Jeff Cohen (Column, 9/14/01)

    “Outrage is the natural and appropriate response to the mass murder of September 11. But media should not be glibly encouraging retaliatory violence without remembering that US retaliation has killed innocent civilians abroad, violated international law and done little to make us safer.”

    Nightly News Glosses Over Anti-Terrorism Act

    (Action Alert, 9/27/01)

    “The report–which ends by saying that ‘no one really knows how much authority the new security czar will really have’–suggests that to stay safe, Americans must surrender liberties without even pausing to ask which ones.”

    When Journalists Report for Duty 

    by Norman Solomon (Extra! Update, 10/01)

    “Restrictive government edicts, clamping down on access to information and on-the-scene reports, would be bad enough if mainstream news organizations were striving to function independently. American journalism is sometimes known as the Fourth Estate—but Dan Rather is far from the only high-profile journalist who now appears eager to turn his profession into a fourth branch of government.”

    Retaliation: Reality vs. Pundit Fantasy

    by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

    “One non–Boy Scout the CIA worked with in the 1980s was none other than Osama bin Laden (MSNBC, 8/24/98; Atlantic, 7–8/91)—then considered a valuable asset in the fight against Communism, but now suspected of being the chief instigator of the September 11 attacks.”

    Why They Hate Us: Looking for a Flattering Answer

    by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

    “Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent hijackers, the media assumption was that the terrorists had ties to the Mideast. But rather than a serious examination of what political realities might contribute to an anti-American climate there, many media commentators offered little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric.”

    Extra!: Ground Zero

    Extra! (11-12/01)

    Patriotism and Censorship: Some Journalists Are Silenced, While Others Seem Happy to Muzzle Themselves

    by Seth Ackerman and Peter Hart  (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “War fever in the wake of the September 11 attacks has led to a wave of self-censorship as well as government pressure on the media. With American flags adorning networks’ on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise ‘patriotic’ news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and US foreign policy are coming to seem taboo.”

    Us vs. Them 

    by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “It’s still ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in other words, and we are told to care very much when ‘we’ are in danger and are explicitly warned not to worry too much about ‘their’ lives. Saying that it ‘seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardships in Afghanistan’ (Washington Post, 10/31/01), CNN chief Walter Isaacson even announced that the network would air some kind of disclaimer whenever footage of dead or wounded Afghans is shown.”

    Are You a Terrorist? 

    by Rachel Coen (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “The legal definition of ‘terrorism’ is crucial because the USA PATRIOT act gives law enforcement broad new powers to be used against ‘terrorist’ individuals and groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (10/23/01) warns that this new definition will ‘sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest’ if those acts could be deemed dangerous to human life.”

    ‘No Spin Zone’?

    by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “FAIR activists sent hundreds of letters to O’Reilly after his September 17 program, urging him to consider the ramifications of his rhetoric–and the fact that bombing civilian targets and using starvation as a weapon are war crimes.”

    As if Reality Wasn’t Bad Enough: Dan Rather Spread Alarmist Rumors on September 11

    by Jim Naureckas in Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “But is it really inevitable that anchors will pass on uncorroborated stories to the public—and portray them as fact, not rumor? For days, New Yorkers expressed surprise that the George Washington Bridge story was not true—victims of a needless panic that Dan Rather had helped to spread.”

    Network of Insiders: TV News Relied Mainly on Officials to Discuss Policy 

    by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “No experts on international law appeared, even though a lively debate among international jurists has been brewing since September 11 over how the United States could respond legally to the attacks. Very few university-based experts on the Middle East appeared. (The main exception was [Fouad] Ajami.) This absence contributed to the networks’ striking lack of explanation of what United States’ policies in the Middle East have been in recent years.”

    The Op-ed Echo Chamber: Little or No Space for Dissent From the Military Line

    by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “Whether the mainstream daily op-ed page was ever a true forum for debate or for ‘nontraditional voices’ is questionable. But during the weeks following September’s terrorist attacks, two leading dailies [New York Times and Washington Post] mostly used these pages as an echo chamber for the government’s official policy of military response, while mostly ignoring dissenters and policy critics.” 

    The New Blacklist: The Nation’s Largest Radio Network’s List of ‘Questionable’ Songs  

    by Tom Morello (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “When the horrible attacks of September 11 are used as a pretext for squashing the opinions of dissident artists, people who are not beating the blood-lust drum feel alone and isolated. It’s in times like these when we most need intelligent, thoughtful discussion and debates about the issues of the day.”

    ‘This Isn’t Discrimination, This Is Necessary’

    (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “Leave it to Ann Coulter—whose racism was too much even for the Arab-bashing National Review—to reduce the pro-profiling argument to its fallacious core: ‘Not all Muslims may be terrorists,’ she allowed, ‘but all terrorists are Muslims’ (Yahoo! News, 9/28/01).

    “That’s just wrong, of course, as Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and decades of clinic-bombing, doctor-shooting Christian extremists can attest. The fact is that ethnicity has never been a reliable indicator of who might be involved in terrorism, making racial profiling not only discriminatory but ultimately ineffective.”

    Patriotic Shopping: Media Define Citizenship as Consumerism 

    by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “A number of pundits and politicians offered Americans a simple solution to the helplessness and anxiety they were feeling in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Go shopping!”

    Covering the ‘Fifth Column’: Media Present Pro-War Distortions of Peace Movement’s Views

    by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

    “The distinction between ‘peace with terrorists’ and a peace movement rooted in justice and international law was blurred by the media in general, which rather than airing the views of anti-war leaders generally had pro-war pundits explain–and belittle–those views.”

    Internet Samizdat Releases Suppressed Voices, History

    by Jeff Cohen (Extra!, 12/01)

    “A free press would be debating the issue of Washington’s relations with Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and whether such movements are bred by US policy committed to suppressing secular reformers and leftists in Islamic countries. When the CIA funded the Afghan Mujaheddin in 1979 before the Soviet occupation, it hoped to destabilize a secular, Soviet-friendly government (initially led by Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin), which supported land reform and rights for women.”

    Extra!: From Bozo to Churchill

    Extra! (5-6/02)

    From Bozo to Churchill: George W.’s Post–September 11 Reinvention

    by Mark Crispin Miller  (Extra!, 5–6/02)

    “Countless leaders have been deified by national emergency, but few have been remade as quickly and completely as George W. Bush. In many cases, those who had misread him as a simple tool, braying automatically at his most trivial mistakes, now automatically revered him. Such converts suddenly agreed with those who had seen Bush’s flaws as signs of latent greatness—thitherto the notion only of a large plurality, but now the common wisdom.”

    9/11 Anniversary Coverage Plans Fall Short

    (Media Advisory, 8/26/02)

    “Unfortunately, many media outlets seem ready to exploit America’s grief by replaying the trauma of the attacks, instead of honoring the date with a serious debate over where the country is headed”

    Saddam and Osama’s Shotgun Wedding: Weekly Standard Beats a Long-Dead Horse 

    by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 1–2/04)

    “Hardline officials have spent the last two years leaking stories, writing op-eds, holding private briefings and making public insinuations, all intended to convince the country that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda worked hand in hand.”

    The Media Politics of 9/11

    by Norman Solomon (Media Beat3/25/04)

    “On September 12, Bush’s media stature and poll numbers were soaring. Suddenly, news outlets all over the country boosted the president as a great leader, sometimes likening him to FDR. For many months, the overall media coverage of President Bush was reverential.”

    A Record of Journalism in Crisis: Out of the Buzzsaw, Into the Fire  

    by Francis Cerra Whittelsey  (Extra!, 3–4/06)

    “Not only was good reporting unusual and largely out of sight after September 11, it was also overwhelmed by the Bush administration’s public relations effort…. These journalists see themselves fighting an unrelenting public relations machine, whose effectiveness comes in large part from constant message repetition and automatic coverage of the president every day, even when he makes no news”

    Gullibility Begins at Home: NYT Accepted False Reassurances on Ground Zero Safety 

    by Julie Hollar ( Extra!, 11–12/06)

    “It’s not just the government that failed the workers and the public with misleading assurances; the New York Times itself must share that burden. Shortly after the attacks and into the ensuing years, the Times—as both a New York paper and a national paper—failed to mount a functional degree of skepticism toward city and federal government pronouncements about the safety of the air and dust around Ground Zero. They by and large dismissed fears of residents and workers about their safety—even as troubling studies and voices of dissent cropped up in the public and private sectors, and in other media outlets.”

    Extra!: The Media's Mayor

    Extra! (5-6/07)

    The Media’s Mayor: Mythologizing Giuliani and 9/11 

    by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 5–6/07)

    “[Jonathan] Alter dubbed Giuliani ‘the new Mayor of America,’ which soon morphed to ‘America’s Mayor,’ a moniker used by journalists as if it were a matter of public acclamation rather than a symptom of press corps hero worship.”

    ‘America Was Safer Under Bush’: Journalists Accept GOP’s Screwy Terrorism Scorecard

    by Steve Rendall  (Extra!, 3/10)

    “That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point.”

    The Uses of September 11: To the Right, Terror Attacks Are Theirs to Exploit—or Dismiss—as They Like

    by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 3/11)

    “But the hallowed memory of September 11 is a conservative sham. While the attacks may be the gift that keeps on giving for GOP politics—when politically useful—the right frequently permits itself to diminish or deride the memory and symbols of the attacks for its own convenience.”

    Extra!: I Want You to Keep Fighting in Afghanistan

    Extra! (7/11)

    ‘Waterboarding Worked’?: After bin Laden’s Death, Media Push Pro-Torture Message

    by Peter Hart (Extra!, 6/11)

    “Despite Bill O’Reilly’s assertion that his show was a lonely pro-torture voice, there were many media voices suggesting a reevaluation of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. Bin Laden may be dead, but the corrosive effect on public discourse of the “war on terror” lives on.

    Losing the Plot: The Afghan War After bin Laden

    by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 7/11)

    What was missing from these and most other corporate media discussions of bin Laden and Afghanistan was any recognition of the part that country played in the Al-Qaeda leader’s strategic vision. For bin Laden, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was not a threat to his plan for the triumph of his brand of right-wing Islam—it was the central element of that plan.

    Fox’s Eric Bolling Fans on Terror Facts—Twice

    by Steve Rendall (FAIR.org, 7/15/11)

    “Glenn Beck’s temporary replacement in the 5 p.m. slot on Fox News, Eric Bolling, has started out with a bang. On the July 13 edition of his new show the Five, the host declared: ‘America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time.’”

    Extra! Covering the Lasting Fallout of September 11

    Extra! (9/11)

    The Forever Wars: Media Enlist to Promote Unending Military Adventures

    by Peter Hart (Extra!, 9/11)

    “The shift from the US’s time-limited military adventures since the Vietnam War—in conflicts like Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Kosovo—to today’s seemingly interminable and endlessly multiplying military commitments is one of the most notable, yet little noted, features of the post-September 11 landscape. And corporate journalists seem all too willing to encourage Washington’s new ‘permanent war’ footing.”

    The ‘Worst of the Worst’?: 9/11, Guantánamo and the Failures of US Corporate Media

    by Andy Worthington  (Extra!, 9/11)

    “On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, media bear a large responsibility for having allowed cynical lawmakers to portray Guantánamo as a prison holding ‘the worst of the worst,’ despite so much evidence that Bush administration officials were lying when they first coined that phrase.”

    Whistling Past the Wreckage of Civil Liberties: Watchdogs Slept Through a Decade of Rollback

    by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11)

    “Media submerge the reality of the assault on civil rights every time they report the state’s overreaches as being about ‘terror-fighting tools,’ as the AP (5/26/11) described Patriot Act provisions. Under a system of civil liberties, people are regarded as criminals after being convicted of crimes—not deemed to be so beforehand to facilitate stripping them of rights.”

    Richard Cohen Is Sorry You and He Got It Wrong

    by Peter Hart (FAIR.org , 9/6/11)

    “Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this—he was writing columns attacking those who weren’t ‘going along with it.’ As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, ‘How did this fool get on Meet the Press?’”

    ‘Terror Returns’—but When Did It Go Away?

    by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 4/16/13)

    “The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism—and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush ‘kept us safe‘ after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.”

    License to Kill: Little Scrutiny of Resolution That Greenlighted ‘War on Terror’

    by Norman Solomon (Extra!, 5/13)

    “While the Obama administration considers how to reorganize its war efforts, we should ask why the US media establishment took more than a decade to begin asking basic questions about the Authorization for Use of Military Force—and why the underlying premises of perpetual war continue to elude concerted journalistic scrutiny.

    “The consequences of such media evasions have persisted in tandem with Washington’s political machinations. Rather than handling 9/11 as a crime committed by criminals, the ‘war on terror’ under the AUMF umbrella propelled US military actions that have killed hundreds of thousands in at least six countries.”

    They’ll Be Watching You: Mass Surveillance Uses New Media to Track Every Move You Make

    by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 5/14)

    “After the September 11 attacks, which reignited a xenophobic backlash against immigration, the Department of Homeland Security began recruiting local law enforcement agencies as the next front in the detection and apprehension of undocumented immigrants. What followed was a massive wave of deportations that increased under the Obama administration to over 2 million (Politico, 3/4/14).

    “Like immigration, the ‘War on Terror’ is now being shifted to local law enforcement agencies who, in exchange for federal dollars, are deploying powerful surveillance tools with little oversight and applying these tools to everyday policing, not just ‘counterterrorism.’”

    Forgiving Al-Qaeda in Pursuit of a New Enemy

    by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 3/18/15)

    “There are indications (as noted by the blog Moon of Alabama3/11/15) of a shift in the Western foreign policy establishment toward seeing groups like Al-Qaeda—that is, far-right terrorist groups who espouse a violent strain of Sunni Islam—not as the main targets of US military operations but as potential allies against the governments Washington has identified as more important enemies, namely Shi’ite-led Iran and Syria.”

    NYT Recalls Media’s ‘Journalistic Detachment’ Before Iraq War

    (Extra!, 9/16)

    “In his retrospective (7/19/16) on outgoing Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who lost his job amidst numerous charges of sexual harassment, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg included this remarkable sentence:

    It was Mr. Ailes who, after the September 11 attacks, directed his network to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House, which jarred the rest of his industry.

    “Of course, Fox News was far from alone in abandoning ‘classic journalistic detachment’ (such as it is) in the lead-up to the Iraq War—the New York Times certainly not excepted. Times reporters like Michael Gordon and Judith Miller helped get the nation ‘fully behind the war’ with front-page stories touting ‘evidence’ of WMDs that did not exist, while others wrote ‘news analysis’ like ‘All Aboard: America’s War Train Is Leaving the Station’ (2/2/03) and ‘US Plan: Spare Iraq’s Civilians’ (2/23/03).”

    After 1,379 Days, NYT Corrects Bogus Claim Iran ‘Sponsored’ 9/11

    by Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 7/6/17)

    “In its reporting on a dubious lawsuit alleging Iranian meta-involvement in 9/11, the New York Times badly misunderstood the case and maintained for more than three years, in the paper of record, that the government of Iran ‘sponsored’ the September 11, 2001, attacks. The belated correction, issued late Wednesday night on two widely spaced articles on the topic, unceremoniously noted that Iran did not, in fact, help commit the 9/11 attacks.”

    On 18th Anniversary of 9/11, Media Worry About ‘Premature’ End to Afghan War

    by Josh Cho (FAIR.org, 9/11/19)

    “The New York Times (8/2/19) gave a platform to retired generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus to lobby for keeping thousands of “Special Operations forces” in Afghanistan:

    “US troops in Afghanistan have prevented another catastrophic attack on our homeland for 18 years,” General Keane said in an interview. “Expecting the Taliban to provide that guarantee in the future by withdrawing all US troops makes no sense.”

    “The Times might have pointed out that the September 11 attacks were carried out by militants based in the United States and recruited in Germany.”

    Actually, Giuliani Has Always Been Like This 

    by Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 10/10/19)

    “Giuliani was heralded as a hero when the United States was desperately looking for one after the WTC attacks—despite the fact that his actions on the day of the attacks contributed to the deaths of emergency responders, and his insistence that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe without filtration no doubt led to the deaths of many more (Extra!, 11–12/06, 5–6/07).”

    Krugman Recalls 9/11’s Silver Linings 

    (Extra!, 10/20)

    “’Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly,’ New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted on the 19th anniversary of September 11 attacks. ‘Notably, there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened.’ Anti-Muslim hate crimes increased 17-fold after 9/11, the FBI reported (Human Rights Watch, 11/02)—but apparently that doesn’t qualify as ‘mass.’

    “Krugman, after praising George W. Bush as someone who ‘tried to calm prejudice, not feed it,’ did acknowledge that he used 9/11 to ‘take us into an unrelated and disastrous war’—the almost 19-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, apparently, not qualifying as a disaster. Before alluding to Iraq, Krugman mentioned that in the wake of the attacks, “my wife and I took a lovely trip to the US Virgin Islands…because air fares and hotel rooms were so cheap.”

    As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

    by Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 8/19/21)

    “In addition to the Taliban signaling that it could be open to extraditing the Al Qaeda leader in October 2001, according to a former head of Saudi intelligence (LA Times, 11/4/01), the Taliban said in 1998 that it would hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the US’s close ally; the Saudi intelligence official says that the Taliban backed off after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda. The outlets thus failed to inform their readers that, had the US pursued negotiations for bin Laden’s extradition, Afghans may have been spared 20 years of devastating war.”


    Research assistance: Adam Weintraub, Jasmine Watson

    The post September 11’s Never-Ending Story appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • ANALYSIS: By Clare Corbould, Deakin University

    Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

    This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

    This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

    The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

    The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

    When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

    General Dwight D. Eisenhower in second world war.
    General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons

    The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

    The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

    Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

    The military industrial juggernaut
    Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

    This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

    Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

    More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

    Detainees in a holding cell at the US-Mexico border.
    Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP

    The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

    These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

    Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

    Normalisation of the security state
    Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

    This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

    Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

    And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

    Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

    Atlanta police in riot gear.
    Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP

    Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

    The heavy cost of the war on terror
    The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

    Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

    The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

    These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

    Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

    Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

    Fighter jet in the Persian Gulf
    Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP

    Life must be precious
    Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

    In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

    We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

    In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

    As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

    The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

    As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.The Conversation

    Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

    — Osama bin Laden (October 2001), as reported by CNN

    What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

    Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

    What began with the post-9/11 passage of the USA Patriot Act  has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

    The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation has been locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

    Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, police violence and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

    The rights embodied in the Constitution, if not already eviscerated, are on life support.

    Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

    Indeed, since the towers fell on 9/11, the U.S. government has posed a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

    While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations (which too often fall into the hands of terrorists), and foment civil unrest in order to keep the security industrial complex gainfully employed.

    The American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

    In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, pandemic lockdowns and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. government—the government that was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”—has become the enemy of the people.

    Consider that the government’s answer to every problem has been more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

    Viewed in this light, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. Or, to put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    This is how the emergency state operates, after all, and we should know: after all, we have spent the past 20 years in a state of emergency.

    From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

    This is a government that has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to idiocracy, and representative government has given way to a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) and a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

    What this really amounts to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield.

    Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before. According to the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression.”

    Clearly, this is not a government that is a friend to freedom.

    Rather, this is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

    This is a government that spies on and treats its people as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes while the freedom to be human is being erased.

    This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. Incredibly, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

    This is a government that routinely engages in taxation without representation, whose elected officials lobby for our votes only to ignore us once elected.

    This is a government comprised of petty bureaucrats, vigilantes masquerading as cops, and faceless technicians.

    This is a government that railroads taxpayers into financing government programs whose only purpose is to increase the power and wealth of the corporate elite.

    This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

    This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

    This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

    This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

    This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

    This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

    This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely based on the say-so of the government.

    This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

    This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

    This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; a million hollow-point bullets; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

    This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

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

    This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

    This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

    This is a government that has empowered police departments to make a profit at the expense of those they have sworn to protect through the use of asset forfeiture laws, speed traps, and red light cameras.

    This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

    This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

    This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

    This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

    This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

    This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

    This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

    This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

    This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

    This is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry, eviscerating individual freedoms so that its own powers can be expanded.

    This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

    In other words, 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 not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

     

    The post The Rise of the Security-Industrial Complex from 9/11 to COVID-19 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The consensus is in — no choice, no life, no job, no nothing, without a passport. That medical, DNA scan, the retina scan, all biological systems covered, that all-encompassing passport that lists every move, every moment, every job, every purchase, every fine, penalty, tax, rental, home, significant or insignificant emotional and economic and familial event, captured in a chip. Americans are spoiled, for sure, as are Europeans, and Canadians. That mostly encompasses the Great White Hopes of those respective “countries.” The rest of us, in these “first world” environs are struggling, even with debit and credit and La-La Land accoutrements ad infinitum.

    These new times in the west are old times, bubbling up, really, from the early conquest days of razing Indian families, destroying and taking over and plowing through villages, lands, territories. Entire rooms at elite Ivy League universities and museums with drawers and boxes of Native American skulls, bones, skins, eyes, belongings, sacred objects. It is the way of the Egyptologists, and it is the way of the Crusades. Pillage, set villages on fire, and now, set states and countries on fire with fear and terror campaigns in order to exact total compliancy. Services, labor, debt, future payments, extracted from us, capitalism’s marks. Victims. Useless eaters-breeders-breathers-squatters.

    Here, from David Rovics, musician and protestor, with some great stuff on Dissident Voice over the years, just coming back from Denmark (and other countries in his gig line). He embraces progressivism and the forced jabs. He is a good fellow, who interviewed me, and we talked about other things tied to the ugly side of leftists and their canceling culture, censorship, etc., but this conversation about jab/mask/remote lockup mandates has not happened yet. I still have room in my brain to listen to what he says, though he misses so many points here:

    Despite the prevalence of disinformation platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being as popular in Denmark as anywhere else that doesn’t have the good sense to ban them, the anti-vaccine movement and anti-lockdown movement in Denmark never grew to the proportions of such movements in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere. But unlike those aforementioned countries, in Denmark most people have a well-founded reason to trust the government on matters of public health and safety.

    In Denmark, if anyone jaywalks, they’re usually either a foreigner or an antisocial type. The overwhelming majority of Danes would never do that. This is also true in Germany and some other countries. Americans and Brits and others visiting from abroad tend to make typically American and British individualistic, antisocial assumptions about this conformist behavior. They see a crowd of Germans or Danes standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the “walk” signal, even if there’s no traffic in any direction, and they see something scary, from Children of the Corn or some other horror movie, a bunch of zombies who can’t think for themselves, or are afraid of getting a ticket. (source — David Rovics)

    That’s a whole other set of discussion points from this tour he had in Denmark about what democratic socialism is, what society is, how science and government should be trusted (really?). Jaywalking and shoot, tossing banana peels on the side of the road. How dare us lazy, supercilious and egotistical North Americans! Yankees!

    The unfolding global hysteria is congealing into even more lovely by-products of Big Pharma as Dictatorship. It comes in many forms and offshoots, for sure. The main functions of Western society are broken — neoliberal and conservative values (sic) have gutted infrastructure, have thrown trillions of bucks-euros to the few, have propped up this society into a very effective kleptocracy, have imbued a dog eat dog set of beliefs into a slew of folks.

    We are at the point where billionaires and their lackeys in high places set the narrative, tone, and write the legislation, laws and force zero delimits on corporations and government in this “we the people” system we supposedly “fought” for. There is collapse, after collapse, after collapse, and it is apparent in the lack of governance over decades, and the adventures of imperial overreach, too.

    In daily lives, professional managerial class actors are hitting the middle/upper middle class stratum, economically, through the systems of pain, fines, fees, tolls, penalties, regressive taxation, permits and litigation that eat at us, the 80 percent, from the soul and the brain and the body. We are in a time of most people not being able to navigate “the system,” and that can be any system — school, medical, social security, DMV, courts, and any number of systems of oppression and subjugation. So it is a time of chaos, now Covid Chaos, moving into more Chaos.

    Teachers should be a priority for Covid vaccines, unions and others say - POLITICO

    “People are fed up,” says Winni Paul, a management consultant whose clients have included campuses and higher-education groups. “The graciousness, the compassion, the ‘we do it for the students, we do it for the work’ — that’s gone.”

    And I am with a group of teachers from many states, who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the forced jabs, the forced proof of jabs, the forced masking, all of that, and many will not submit to the experimental mRNA, many have looked into these DNA-alternating medical devices, and they feel alone, big time. Their AFT (American Federation of Teachers) union has caved, and they see in big cities and small, all venues requiring, soon, a passport, CDC-approved vaccination card.

    Delta airlines is forcing non-vaccinated employees to pay an additional $200 a month premium, AKA fine for not being jabbed. Oh, that was yesterday (August 25), and that will not be the end of it. Fools like Thom Hartman advocate ER physicians having the right to refuse treatment to anyone coming in — motorcycle accident, heart attack, broken leg, stroke — who are not vaccinated.

    This is the Brave New World already outlined by the eugenicists of the 1920s, of the Modest Proposal of Swift’s time, of the middle passage days of tossing overboard hundreds of sick shackled slaves in one one-way crossing. Multiply that by hundreds of ships, tossing human beings for the sharks, alive, shackled in chains. It is the genocidal policies of empires and their corporate thugs (overlords) in despoiling cultures, murdering millions, and enslaving regions for their rubber, silver, gold, lithium, any number of things the capitalists call loot and booty. Pirates compared to the thieves from history and today seem like Fred McFeely Rogers in comparison.

    See the source image

    Even a saint, Fauci, he is a titan of terror in his old man’s way — “over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54% of American children compared to 6% when he joined NIAD.” (source — RFK Jr.)

    See the source image

    In this group of teachers, daily there are emails announcing more and more statewide jab mandates, and the teachers that have to pay twice-a-week tests, if not jabbed, well, it is filling up those school districts; and many now in this group want out, since their email boxes are filling up. Teachers, youngish and not, with no money in the bank, really, and no place to go, since I predict all new rental agreements throughout the land (except in some Breaking Bad locales) will require proof of jab x, jab y, jab z, jab infinity.

    The playing field shifts hourly, and while I have a literary reading manana, in Portland, for this hour, at least, the restaurant and community room demands all to be masked. There is no shot record demand, YET, but that’s on the horizon, since Oregon is the first state to reinstate mandatory outside masking policies. But the venue’s other locations, well, the rock and roll and progressives, they want to see vax cards or proof of SARS-CoV2 free tests. The Crystal Ballroom

    It doesn’t matter how many millions of people worldwide are not happy with mRNA experimental chemicals forced into the bloodstream and across the blood-brain barrier;  not happy with the bioweaponry aspect of Operation Warp Speed; not happy with the therapeutics that have been disavowed and censored, which could have saved millions of lives, possibly. One size fits all, baby. This news aggregator and news maker site, well, it is almost scrubbed from all search engines:

    These stories above and below are verboten in the minds of tens of millions, hundreds of millions Westerners — even though there are robust stories on other topics, besides Fauci, jabs and mRNA, and fascism in this places.

    I am finding people fighting, for sure, against mandates. Hell, my one time with the doctor recently points to this: “While I did get the vaccination, I am against mandates. I am against forcing people against their will to get this. I am of the mind that people have the right to make up their own minds.” He’s older, maybe 70, is a DO, and I know the university where he adjunct taught and matriculated from, Touro University Nevada (TUN) (a private university in Henderson, Nevada. It is part of the Touro College and University System. Touro University Nevada is a branch campus of its sister campus Touro University California.)

    My niece is there, in her second year, and my DO stated, his one word of advice for her is, Cash. “Tell her to write notes to family and friends, and state: ‘please send cash.’” The doctor likes me, and he’s a jokester. He told me reads a lot, and that he did work in Amazonian for years, “saving one life at a time.” He is looking at my recent stress test, and alas, getting a cardiologist on board to maybe do more investigation on some electrical anomalies when I got up to 160 beats per minute, that is another example of the failed capitalist system: there are none here on Highway 101 on the central coast, and getting one to see me could take weeks, out of the cities of Salem or Corvallis. This is the state of medicine, after decades of gutting taxation of the rich and the corporations (who are getting us sick) and years turning medicine into a bizarre insurance scam, where doctors spend more time on the computer screen than with the patient.

    So, this next reset is all about pushing more and more people into fewer and fewer public spheres, pushing people away from outliers or those defiant and dissident like me and millions. It is about controlling the masses, setting forth sophisticated bandwagon forms of propaganda, and setting afire all forms of community gatherings and robust discussions of the millions of topics of the day.

    With this teachers’ group, the messages are coming in:

    • Governor Pritzker just announced mandatory vax for all IL teachers
    • Here is Dr. Peter McCullough talking about the dangers of vaccines, among other things: Basically, the vaxxed are projecting all the havoc they themselves are wreaking even as “life is pretty much back to normal among the vaccinated,” as many are bragging onto the unvaxxed. Many op-eds in publications like WaPo and the NYT are filling their pages with doctors martyring themselves and declaring they won’t treat unvaxxed anymore (to cheers from bots and humans alike in the comments section) and normalizing ending friendships based on vaccination status. But they are the super spreaders. They are the ones making children and Grandma sick. This is scapegoating at its finest.
    • Some great work is being done by Mike Williams @ Sage of Quay. Also, great Common Law shows being done by Crrow777 Radio Alfonso Faggiola and Lena Pu.
    • Want to see a man stand up to the controllers? Check out Paul Unslaved . You can also gain a little insight from some of the good First Amendment auditors like Long Island Audit.
    • California AB455 – this bill, if passed, will mandate the C19 vaccine for all CA employees and for CA citizens to enter any establishment except church and grocery stores:
    Doctor McCullough video.
    • Rally against this action set for September 8th
    • Some good news: a touching video of resistance to vaccine mandates in France (i cant verify the authenticity but hope it is real)
    • Lastly, ICYMI – Illinois’ Vax Verify – vaccination verification is tied to Experian – meaning residents will have to go through a one-time verification process through Experian to access their vaccination records. So stating the obvious – this is opening the door increasingly towards a social credit system.

    Then this from one of the people on this list wanting the mandates and the draconian measures stopped:

    Just a quick note: This Sunday will mark 58 years of me being active in the political sphere. Back in ’64, it was as a Goldwater volunteer. Some 6 years later, i switched sides, a consequence of the Vietnam War, the counterculture, ecological crisis,…  And became much more of an activist. I have no love whatsoever for the right.  But I’ve also seen the “left” act at critical points as a defender of the capitalist status quo, particularly as a consequence of the dominant tendency within the left to accept the state as if it were an institution acting on behalf of society as a whole, rather than the instrument of class power it has been since it emerged in history thousands of years ago. Both left and right (and “center”) are fully on board with the onrushing police state, while each proclaims itself to be defending the interests of humanity against the others. People need to look to themselves for solutions, and learn from historical movements, including anarchists and anti-statist socialists.

    Connecting the dots is easy on one hand, but to get people to see this entire terror theater as planned is another can of GMO worms. Here, this is certainly a global, or EU, story worth a million lines of digital ink: Why do the experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies fight for higher pesticide exposure by Rosemary Mason

    I heartily accept the motto,—”That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—”That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men and women are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

    — Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, 1849

    Succinctly, Communist approaches to anti-statism center on the relationship between political rule and class struggle. Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. To this extent, the ultimate goal of communist society was theorized as both stateless and classless.

    We are at 8 billion, and the planet is run by Blackstone and BlackRock and around 30 financial organizations, and around 140 corporations. The bottleneck is what the planned pandemic was all about — getting people to run away from sanity, common sense, and running into the various insane asylums. For anyone to question why some of us — who are way beyond just coming out from under the Capitalist-Media-Education rock — might doubt the purveyors of capital, scientism, control, policing, finance and corrupt drug companies, well, that is where I am now — “since the majority of people are in line for the jab, what’s your fucking lunatic problem?”

    Here, Chris Williams, and, yes, on ecosocialism — hmm:

    The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene it’s hard to wrap your head around it sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day. One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit card—“Less plastic, more human—Discover it is human.” Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of food—how you can order online instead of having to phone somebody—and the ad read, “You’ve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night.” The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows no depths to which it will not plumb.

    This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the People’s Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far more with us now than it did even in his time.

    On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire.

    That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is currently structured. He goes on:

    In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

    At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

    John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism:  “Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally. However, as ecosocialist analysis has grown, various divergent branches of thought have emerged, often in conflict with each other. Based on the conviction that clarity about capitalism’s relation to the environment is indispensable for the strategic understanding of present-day struggles, this talk will present some of the new research within Marxian ecology, bringing together the core issues of the expropriation of nature and the metabolic rift, and seeking to unite the ecosocialist movements of our time.”

    Another set of notes from another teacher on this V is for Vendetta Vaccines email group — I’m calling it that as a joke:

    • I just attended a workshop for religious exemptions, and will forward the email for any of those who wish to attend. I am also happy to share insights and notes I took to help out anyone who wishes to take this route. However, I would like to share some notes and important information discussed in this workshop.
    • First, if you are part a union or teachers union, Collective Bargaining needs to take place. Many unions did not have a seat at the table and have sent cease and desist letters that could delay the mandates. Remember the unions represent both the majority and the minority of their union members and even if there is only 15 percent against the mandates, those individuals should be represented. It was recommended to call your Labor Relations Representative or Union Rep to see  if they have sent a cease and desist letter or are planning on it. Key word is the Collective Bargaining aspect of the unions and you may be able to ask them to do so.
    • Additionally, I think if you are able to file for a religious exemption it is a good way to buy time. The common law approach may be a good option for those who do not have an option. Realistically, for Californians we are a Right to Work state, and employers have the right to fire and hire at will.  With either method there is a possibility of job termination which has to be considered, and I do not know exactly how the outcome has been going for individuals who have filed religious vs. common law approaches. That said I do know there have been many religious exemptions accepted and there is an appeals process if denied. If you are on a timetable and need to be vaccinated by a date that is closely approaching, the religious exemption is probably more likely to be one way to hold onto employment a little longer.  My understanding of the common law approach is that it can be more time consuming because legal notices have times frames for notices, responses, and actions to take place and may not work with your deadline which again can lead to termination. Because California is an At Will Work state there may be risk to filing for any unemployment as well, so all these things should be considered before deciding which route to take.
    • I am not saying one option is better than the other, I am just presenting them as Option A or  Option B, because I think we all have differences in our personal situations. One may work better for you personally than the other. That said, we should also have our plan B  in place if neither work. Helping each other is essential and it will be good to share with one another what has worked and what hasn’t, and I do not want to argue either method, just help out in any way possible. Our differences in ideology are unimportant to me at this time. I believe there is a good portion of us, who are strong personalities, opinionated and intelligence — and these may be the wonderful unifying qualities that have brought us together at this critical time to fight for our humanity.

    GoFundMe for a new novel, or old one, I am fixing up to get published!

    Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
    Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need –
    new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
    Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

    — Rudyard Kipling (1899)

    The post Little Deaths . . . Finding Solace Inside One’s Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Drones are being used as weapons of terror and oppression throughout the world. Not only do they make it possible for the United States to colonize and occupy other countries, but police departments in the US have access to surveillance and weaponized drones to target civilians. As the technology evolves, drones have the potential to lead to greater wars, including a war between major powers. To prevent this dystopian future, anti-drone activists are organizing an international campaign to ban drones. Clearing the FOG speaks with Nick Mottern, one of the founders of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, about the impact of drones on communities and the work to end them.

    The post Preventing A Dystopian Future: New Campaign To Ban Killer And Surveillance Drones appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.

    • The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans. 
    • 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
    • Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance. 
    • Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
    • Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
    • The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.

    According to the American Psychological Association:

    • 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress 
    • 62 percent were stressed about money
    • 61 percent were stressed about work
    • 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
    • 43 percent were stressed about health care

    Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.

    Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave™ — by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.

    High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:

    • Inability to pay attention
    • Decrease in visual perception
    • Feeling agitated and unorganized
    • Memory loss
    • Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking

    This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.

    When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.

    Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.

    If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?

    I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.

    Would the folks who run things in God’s Country™ ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.

    Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.

    The Land of the Free™ incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.

    Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.

    Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?

    If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.

    Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.

    “To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”

    Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

    Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number –
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you
    Ye are many – they are few.

    The Mask of Anarchy, 1819

    The post The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The child welfare system is a powerful state policing apparatus that functions to regulate poor and working-class families.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Today, at a hearing on “Human Rights and Freedom of Expression in Morocco” held by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress, CPJ Middle East and Northern Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour presented testimony on the threats to press freedom and journalists’ safety in Morocco.

    Mansour’s testimony focused on Morocco’s record of retaliation against journalists using dubious legal charges, smear campaigns, and surveillance. He emphasized that this record stretches back decades, has intensified since 2015, and includes orchestrated forms of intimidation designed to threaten and silence reporters.

    Mansour also provided recommendations to U.S. policymakers to reverse the downward trend for press freedom in the country, including calling on U.S. authorities to demand the release of all jailed members of the press; to emphasize press freedom in meetings with Moroccan authorities; and to investigate authorities’ alleged use of surveillance technology to monitor reporters.

    Mansour’s testimony is available in English and Arabic.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.

    TS Candii was living in a homeless shelter in the Bronx when she first encountered the New York City Police Department. Candii had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette when police officers approached her to become an informant. 

    When she refused, they threatened to arrest her on sex work-related charges unless she performed oral sex on both officers. 

    “I hate to say it like this but [afterward] I was excited that I could cross the street without being entrapped or arrested,” Candii said to New York City Council members, recalling how she felt after the rape. 

    That was a decade ago, when Candii first moved to New York City as a Black transgender woman seeking to restart her life in a so-called liberal city. These days, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) uses cutting-edge technology to surveil homeless people. This includes a dystopian network of surveillance cameras and other data collection efforts to track individuals living on the streets and target them for social service outreach and policing.

    This year, for the first time in history, the NYPD publicly disclosed its surveillance tools after the passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. The law requires the NYPD to release reports on how these tools are used and allows the public 45 days to provide input that the department must consider when finalizing its policies.   

    Proponents of the POST Act argue these laws are a first step to limiting police powers. For example, they believe such laws allow advocates to understand how the city targets homeless New Yorkers. The city claims the Street Homelessness Joint Command Center allows the NYPD to track individuals living on the streets and target them for social service outreach and policing in order to ‘end homelessness.’ 

    Critics, meanwhile, question whether laws like the POST Act are simply another police reform that fails to limit police power and instead legitimizes violent surveillance practices against Black and brown communities. They argue that transparency does nothing to change these tactics, which houseless activists and outreach workers deem ineffective and cruel because police enforcement with homeless individuals often results in confiscation of their belongings, tickets, and/or arrests.

    This debate has national relevance. Cities like Seattle, Denver, Oakland, and San Francisco have increased public oversight of police surveillance. While the POST Act is weaker than other oversight laws, it follows a growing trend across cities and, in this case, impacts the nation’s largest police force.

    The POST Act passed after three years of advocacy led by a group of legal organizations including the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), which fights to end discriminatory surveillance in New York. 

    For Albert Fox Cahn, the Executive Director of STOP, the law offers a basis for further litigation that could require the NYPD to divulge more information. 

    “The POST act was an important first step because you can’t outlaw what you can’t see and, without transparency about what systems the NYPD is using, it’s impossible to outlaw those systems,” Cahn said. 

    The Pitfalls of Transparency

    The NYPD released 36 reports outlining its use of different surveillance tools. The reports use boilerplate language, including blatantly false claims such as denying the racist applications of spy tools despite widespread documentation. 

    The reports revealed the use of tools that enable police to broadly identify the general vicinity of a WiFi-enabled device, investigate cryptocurrency transactions, and the extent to which officers use fake social media accounts to carry out investigations and arrests. 

    “When you’re not from the community, it’s easy to see this minimalist action as a win,” said Mutali Nkonde, leader of AI For The People, an organization advancing racial justice in the technology field. 

    Nkonde supported the POST Act in 2019 but changed her opinion after the 2020 uprisings demonstrated the need to ban police technology instead of asking for transparency.  “The police can come in and kill me in my own bed at any point,” she said, reflecting on how police killed Breonna Taylor. “Laws like the POST Act are not designed to address that.” 

    At the same time, such reforms can cause harm by legitimizing the police as an institution. 

    “You have this narrative that police keep us safe while police have been a threat to the public safety of Black, Latinx, and low-income communities this whole time,” said Keli Young, Civil Rights Campaign Coordinator at Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL), a grassroots membership organization in New York organizing to end mass incarceration. 

    In the past, organizers and advocates sought transparency around police spy tools through lengthy lawsuits and tireless public records requests. 

    “Legislating regulation or oversight are reforms that fail shrink the power of the police—they seek to fix the police use of these tools rather than completely abolishing it,” said Myaisha Hayes, director at MediaJustice which leads the fight for racial, gender, and economic equity in the digital age.  

    The POST Act passed at the height of racial justice protests, during which the NYPD violently attacked protestors on camera. Local news outlets hailed it as an “effort to overhaul the police force” despite how weak it is compared to laws in other cities giving local governments more oversight of police.  

    In contrast, New York City’s charter limits the city council’s ability to oversee police.  

    “The POST Act is not a transformative law and none of us who worked on it are fooled by that,” said Rashida Richardson, a visiting scholar at Rutgers who helped draft the law. “But we’re also realistic about the political reality we live in: we didn’t have a city government willing to do this pre-uprisings.” 

    In contrast, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which builds community power towards the abolition of the police state, argues the POST Act failed to meet the moment. 

    “The slogans were ‘defund the police’ and ‘fuck the police’ not ‘reform the police,’” said Shakeer Rahman, an organizer with the coalition.

    Young saw the consequences of this dissonance play out in New York City, remarking, “I don’t think anyone is surprised when politicians and lawmakers come out and say, ‘this is reform, you all got what you asked for’ but it actually makes us less safe.” 

    “That was a year ago and in the past year we’ve seen police continue to kill Black and Latinx people at alarming rates.” 

    Since then, only five officers will face penalties for attacking protestors during the 2020 uprising. The NYPD will determine those penalties, capturing the futility of police reforms. 

    Efforts to defund the NYPD last year were thwarted by cosmetic changes to the city budget that did not result in any meaningful reduction of the department’s $11 billion war chest. This year, the city increased the NYPD budget by $200 million. 

    This includes $47 million for expanding surveillance tools and ensuring more officers have tablets with access to what the NYPD describes as “one of the world’s largest networks of cameras, license plate readers, and radiological censors.” 

    From Raising Awareness to Building Power 

    TS Candii has continued to see other Black trans women bear the brunt of police enforcement and surveillance as they navigate the criminal legal system. 

    Candii is now the founder of Black Trans Nation, a non-profit organization led by and for Black trans sex workers. The group played a central role in repealing the same statute that officers used to threaten Candii with arrest. 

    The loitering for the purpose of prostitution statute was passed in 1976 at the behest of the NYPD and has been used to criminalize and surveil Black and Latinx trans women walking down the street in low-income neighborhoods.

    “The community doesn’t even know what the POST Act entails,” Candii said, “how many lives has that law saved?” 

    She compared the situation to the repeal of the loitering statute earlier this year, which led the city’s district attorneys to vacate thousands of convictions and clear arrest histories. People could now seek opportunities they were previously disqualified from due to their criminal record. 

    These differences capture how high-level advocacy organizations such as STOP often measure success in terms of media attention or policy changes whereas some grassroots organizations measure impact by building people power to create material differences in the lives of community members.

    While STOP was awarded a prestigious grant shortly after their legislative victory, Candii’s experience has been vastly different. Critics describe these trends as part of a long history of funders investing in liberal reforms instead of more radical demands thus altering the direction of social movements.

    “White people pass a law, they get money,” she said. “Black trans women pass a law and we don’t even get nothing other than press. It’s ridiculous.”

    The post Abolishing Police Surveillance In NYC: Will Transparency Help Or Make It Harder? appeared first on Shadowproof.

    This post was originally published on Shadowproof.

  • In Asia-Pacific, the demand for airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) is growing, and a wide variety of platforms from manned to unmanned are now being acquired by military operators across the region. Increasingly, this ISR data needs to be disseminated in real time among many potential groups within each sovereign nation’s defence structure so […]

    The post SES to Enable the Next Generation of Military Networks with O3b mPOWER appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  •  

    Janine Jackson interviewed Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn about Pegasus spyware for the July 31, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3

     

    Guardian: Pegasus Project

    Guardian (7/18/21)

    Janine Jackson: If you don’t know the story of how a consortium of journalists revealed how countries around the world have bought spyware from an Israeli surveillance firm, supposedly to track terrorists and other criminals, well, that’s understandable. Though it is a journalist-driven effort, and is leading to calls for the resignation of officials in Hungary, for example, the Pegasus Project hasn’t really gotten the pay-attention-to-this treatment from US news media. But that emphatically does not mean that the story doesn’t concern you and your right to know.

    Joining us now to help connect those dots is Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Cindy Cohn.

    Cindy Cohn: Thank you.

    NSO GroupJJ: We’re talking about the Pegasus Project because of a leak of tens of thousands of phone numbers, believed selected as candidates for possible surveillance by clients of this company, NSO Group. The technology in question doesn’t just allow access to conversations and photos, but can also turn your cell phone into a listening device. But for those who really haven’t heard anything, what is the story here? What’s going on?

    CC: There has been a dark business that has existed for quite a while now, developing what we call malware—which is software, but designed to hurt you—and selling it to governments to use against people that governments want to secretly track.

    What happened here was that a list of 50,000 phone numbers that had been targeted by NSO Group’s client leaked, and got to a bunch of journalists. And they started analyzing it, and figuring out who some of these people were. And it turns out a tremendous number of them are journalists, all around the world. Kind of reveals how deeply governments are engaged in spying on the people who bring us the news.

    JJ: My sense is that this is being treated as suggesting a threat of potential misuse, rather than constituting a harm in its own right. And it seems to be kind of running up against the “Well, it doesn’t have to bother me because I have nothing to hide” phenomenon. I’m not asking you to scare people, but can you just illustrate the seriousness of the findings here? What are the implications?

    Cindy Cohn

    Cindy Cohn: “We all rely on journalists’ ability to find out what’s going on, especially in ways that governments don’t like, to be an informed populace.”

    CC: The NSO Group is reportedly—and this leak confirms it—deeply involved in Saudi Arabia’s spying and ultimately killing of reporter Jamal Khashoggi, as well as a Mexican journalist. This isn’t just about spying; this is about murder, at the end of the day.

    And we all rely on journalists’ ability to find out what’s going on, especially in ways that governments don’t like, to be an informed populace. I think it’s not an overstatement to say the question of self-governance turns on whether the current people in power can hide from us the truth about what’s going on in the world.

    How  do we elect the right people if the people in power right now are making sure we don’t find out the whole story? So I think it’s tremendously important for, fundamentally, are we governing ourselves?

    JJ: To be clear: This Israeli company, NSO Group, they’re not the only source of concern here, right?

    CC: No, no, no. They’re one of the more notorious and, of course, they were the subject of this leak, and the list of countries is pretty bad here. But, yeah, they’re not the only one.

    As I said,  this is a business, and it’s a dark business that I think some people—including the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression—ultimately, we reached the point where we’re calling for a moratorium on governmental use of these malware technologies, because it’s clear that governments can’t use them responsibly. And we don’t have real mechanisms for accountability when they misuse it, either. And so, whether it’s stopping governments from getting this in the first place, or making sure that when governments misuse this information, we have real remedies—we aren’t doing any of that right now.

    Kiefer Sutherland portrays a torturer on 24

    Kiefer Sutherland on 24

    JJ: I’m going to bring you back to what accountability might look like. But if I can just take a question on media: I’m thinking back to the show 24 that suggested that there might be a time when you need to torture someone, you know, because they have information that would prevent the deaths of many people. We get into a lot of trolley problems and, “Don’t you think the state should be allowed to surveil cell phones in case terrorists something something something?”

    The Justice minister in Hungary says, “Every country needs such tools.” How do you talk about what’s being lost here? How do we bring folks back to valuing privacy, in this moment where people—some people, anyway—just seem to have given up, and the idea that, “Well, if I’m not committing a crime, I shouldn’t care about my privacy”?

    CC: I think there’s a few things. The first thing I would say is that we shouldn’t take policy advice from a fictional TV show. The reality is, the US Senate did a big report on this, the torture done under the Bush administration. The times in which we need Kiefer Sutherland to torture people, it’s a fiction most of the time; 99.99% of the time, it’s a fiction. And I think if we’re not grounded in that, and if we’re stuck in TV, we’re not going to be able to look at this fairly. So that’s the first thing I would do, is I would push back on this TV show as a basis for us deciding our laws.

    The second thing I would argue is that the American Constitution is all about limits on what the government can do, right? It’s not the case that the founders of this country… and for good reason, of course, because we wouldn’t have gotten independence if the founders of this country hadn’t decided that letting the cops just randomly break into people’s houses to find out whether people were paying their taxes or not—remember, the Boston Tea Party was about taxes, and the Fourth Amendment was written because the colonists didn’t think it was OK for the cops to just break into anybody’s house because they might be breaking the law—and that’s what the Fourth Amendment is based on.

    And that’s not the only thing. Certainly there’s international law, something called the necessary and proportionate principle that’s built into international law, that reflects some of the same values of the Fourth Amendment. They’re not exactly the same, but both of them recognize that you can’t just “never say no” to government because they might be able to dream up a scenario in which they need power. The whole idea of a society that’s governed by laws and not by men is based upon limiting what the government can do.

    So I guess, sure, if we want to just go back to a feudal society where rulers have all the power, we’re certainly capable of doing that. But I would argue that that  really undoes hundreds of years of trying to find the balance between governmental power and the rest of us.

    I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get historical about it. But I really do think this idea that, you know, because the government can dream up some reason why it might need a power, we should give it to them, really flies in the face of the whole history of this country, and I would argue even longer. So that’s the second thing.

    The third thing is, you can’t always predict who’s going to be in power in the future. We just came out of four years of an administration that felt very differently about who its enemies were than the administration before that. And whether you’re a fan of the previous administration or the one before that, you have to recognize that who’s in charge of those levers of power can change, and can change in very dramatic ways.

    And again, if you look at the list of people who are on the 50,000 phone numbers that were leaked here, you see the kinds of people who, really, the rest of us rely on. And central to that is journalists; there were over 180 journalists on the list that they were able to confirm, but I suspect there are many be more. Human rights defenders, political activists, opposition parties, even President Macron of France was on the list. So even currently powerful political people were on the list, because they’re being watched by others.

    So I think that it’s not realistic to think that we always and forever will have governmental powers who will only use these powers for good and never use them for evil. Instead, we have to put systems and structures in place to cabin those situations, so that we limit the times in which they happen, and we have accountability when they do. To be able to sue if these malware companies are pretending to be them; they have deep pockets, they can do this.

    But also the people who are harmed should be able to, and EFF brought a case a few years ago, on behalf of an American guy who was spied on by the government of Ethiopia; he was an immigrant. And we were unable to get a remedy for this guy, because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity. We need those doctrines to get out of the way so that people can have real accountability.

    And then the companies that actually built this software need to be accountable when that software is used to hurt somebody. If you have a tool that is designed to hurt people and then it hurts people, you should be held accountable for those harms, and you shouldn’t be able to basically wash your hands of it.

    And then, finally, NSO Group claimed that it had a set of rules about who it sold to, and wouldn’t sell to repressive governments. But it seems that they were completely toothless. And we need to hold companies to those kinds of standards. And we need to make them accountable when they violate them.

    JJ: And make them transparent, so that folks know what’s going on, because it’s often being told that it’s in our name.

    CC: Yeah, totally. That’s the stepping stone, right? Without transparency, you can’t have accountability. We have lived for 200 years in the United States with the idea of warrant, where the government has to go to a judge and make its case, and then it gets a warrant to be able to turn on surveillance against you. The country has not fallen because we have basic accountability in this area. Now, I would argue we probably need more accountability in the context of domestic warrants, but we at least have some. In these international situations right now, we have almost none, and we really need to bring the level up, so that we can stop these kinds of travesties.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Cindy Cohn; she’s executive director of Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can find their work online at EFF.org. Cindy Cohn, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    CC: Thank you so much for giving us some attention.

    The post ‘Governments Are Spying on the People Who Bring Us the News’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • I remember chatting with a man from Iraq in 2016.  He was driving a taxi in Germany.  I wrote about him in one of my essays:

    “Last month, I was chatting with an Iraqi taxi driver in Berlin. My 12 year old son and I took a cab from the Museum for Contemporary Art to our hotel. I couldn’t help but ask the cab driver why he ended up in Berlin. He said it was something to do with the availability of the visa. He stressed that he had to leave because he didn’t like Islam. He said Muslims were killing each other.

    I felt very slightly sad because he sounded like he had to say that to prove that he wasn’t a “terrorist”. I told him that it was the US that supported Saddam when it was convenient. Then, the US flipped, changing its policy, as doing so became more convenient. I asked him, Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, same old story, no?

    Then he said something unexpected. He said it was a “people’s revolution”. “We stood against Saddam”.  He was referring to the first gulf war in 1991. He went on to describe how it didn’t go as people wished, and it brought about the devastating trade embargo, more war, ISIS and so on.  His voice was passionate.  I felt the anger and frustration against war and imperialism that I also feel myself, in his voice.”

    The imperial war against countries that defy the US hegemonic imperatives involves a few steps.  The target population is deprived of their basic necessities by economic embargo, trade sanctions, travel restrictions and demonization of its leader.  The society is destabilized by the lack of resources and economic activities.  The opposing forces in the country are generously funded by the empire to build a momentum against the defying “regime” in the name of “revolution,” “democracy,” “freedom”, etc. The communities are divided. The institutions are compromised to serve capital, adding more confusions and predicaments to the population.

    Quite often this is sufficient enough to silence those who defy such interventions and it results in an overthrow of the existing order.  The society is transformed to suit the colonial policies concocted by western industries, which result in resource extraction, privatization, financialization, exploitation of cheap labor, construction of US military bases and so on.

    Quite a few middle eastern countries have defied such interventions resulting in proxy wars and western military interventions.

    That was the war on terror which continues to this day as the US forces are freely employed against the world according to its “war on terror legal framework,” while its measures are still in place as restrictions against our legal rights as well as restrictions at airports and so on.

    Many of us raised our voices against the obvious crime of invading other countries, colonizing them and subjugating them.  To my surprise there were people who objected to our assertion saying that if we didn’t invade them, they would have invaded us, they were “terrorists,” and so on.

    Enormous profits were generated by this huge public project, war, at the expense of the people in the war torn countries as well as oppressed people in some of the richest countries of the world. No one was held accountable for deaths and destruction.  The war to save people from terrorists was a huge capitalist project to expand the power and wealth of hardened criminals who call themselves politicians, philanthropists, businessmen, intellectuals, patriots, academics, and so on.

    The underlining mentality of neo-colonial violence is based on prejudice against the peoples of the targeted countries.  Those peoples, who reside within countries governed by “leaders” who have sworn to obey imperial policies, are subjected to tighter measures of exploitation and subjugation in order to serve the interests of the imperial institutions. The predicaments of the subject population—poverty, social unrest, and corruption, which stem from the economic subjugation, justify the mental superiority among westerners, falsely proving the inferiority of the “barbaric” population which must be “assisted” by westerners.  If the leader of a colonized country attempts to amend the unfair situation by implementing policies that serve that country’s own people, the western authority would mobilize policies to remove such an element.  The policies are firmly backed by the prejudice amongst the imperial population. Simple slogans and key words such as “he is killing his own people,” “save the children,” “regime,” “dictatorship” and “genocide” can trigger the colonial mentality as well as the white savior mentality in the imperial population.

    Fast forward to 2021 — the era of war on virus. We are experiencing a massive wealth transfer to the rich and powerful, which can be best described by Jeff Bezos thanking his workers and customers for his rocket ride. The cynical exploitative violence inflicted against workers is found in all sectors across the country, creating destruction of small community businesses, massive homelessness, suicide surge, spike in drug related deaths.  Lockdown measures are wreaking havoc in vital social relations, which must now be reorganized.

    The virus event has turned the dwindling healthcare system into mask wearing, social distancing and getting injected with extremely lucrative experimental GMO drugs—which are surrounded by  unprecedented numbers of injuries and deaths, far surpassing all combined prior vaccine injury and death reports to the CDC reporting system VAERS.  The lockdown measures and profit oriented measures against the virus further narrowed the capacity of the general healthcare system, resolution in huge numbers of patients without vital care for their urgent conditions. Destroying the healthcare system for the sake of saving lives is only an aspect of the current mobilization.  The education system, which has been under attack for generations by corporate forces, has received a blank check to fire faculties, turn classes into online tutorials, and pursue a new mission to create obedient workers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The financial institution has accelerated its herding of the population into the digital realm where people are conditioned, commodified, and exploited as data.  In every industry, a massive restructuring process for profit is occurring in the name of Covid measures.

    Now, I understand that respiratory illnesses can be very dangerous.  If you look up articles from pre-Covid time, you find desperate calls from healthcare professionals screaming about the risk of flu epidemics due to the lack of facilities and resources. This has become reality after Covid, as massive death tolls have resulted from nursing home lockdowns.  Profit oriented treatment options have been promoted while effective options were restricted, resulting in yet even more deaths and hospitalizations.  But statistically, all these deaths in the US had not exceeded the range of year to year variation in death rate.  This crucial fact has been observed in various countries.  The Covid situation, if anything, is very much a manmade event. It can not be described as a deadly pandemic comparable to the bubonic plague. This should shatter virus event narratives propped up by “cases“ concocted by unreliable PCR tests—its inaccuracy has been highly criticized by many scientists—including the inventor of the PCR test himself–due to its arbitrary results depending on the degree of amplification in search of the targeted DNA fragments.

    The above observation is strictly based on the opinions of numerous healthcare professionals, doctors, and scientists across the globe. At the very least, it must be recognized that there are significant disagreements within the field of science on every aspect of Covid-19, its treatments, and lockdown measures.

    However, none of those are examined in a serious manner by the establishment.  In fact, there are many instances of healthcare professionals being disciplined for reporting cases of vaccine injury, speaking against the treatment policies, and questioning the prevalent assumptions regarding the virus.  Healthcare professionals are actively forced to play along with the official Covid narrative.

    For the general public the mixed emotions over the contradictions have turned to frustration, and the frustration has turned to anger as if we are stuck in a pressure cooker made with official narratives and structural impediments of lockdowns and forced vaccine injection. The heat and pressure have broken down the social fabric as our daily routines are dictated by “new normal.”

    So many things have happened since last year.  But somehow things don’t seem to fit in right places in our heads.

    We mark our sense of time and space with traditional events, daily routines and our common knowledge.  When we lose those, we are left with a series of elements and dynamics without those markers.But alternate markers have been provided by those who have deprived us of the markers.  Our lives are marked with lockdowns, masks and social distancing — the “new normal”.

    Now we mark our lives with it.

    We are told that there is a deadly disease out there and the only solution is to vaccinate.  Our life and death are determined by one of the largest corporate entities, the medical industrial complex.

    Just as the war on terror was described as a “crusade”—legitimizing the twisted religious and cultural superiority of the colonizers, disguising white man’s burden as humanitarian obligation — the war on virus crowns “science” as its guiding force.  However, needless to say, the credibility of the “science” is proportional to the accompanying might of wealth and power—just as the facts of war are bought and sold as “journalism”. Propaganda lies fill the air as those who oppose are marked as “others” who  deserve to be castigated as being outside of the protection of the gated community.

    This way of framing—the medical industrial complex—is useful in understanding the dynamics within the capitalist hegemony. However, such an entity is also a part of the media industrial complex, non profit industrial complex, political industrial complex, and, of course, military industrial complex.  In short, our lives are dictated by multiple dynamic forces of oligarchs, orchestrating a “reality” which firmly manifests as a capitalist framework—a cage to condition our lives based on its imperatives.

    As the current virus mobilization reframes our society, obliterating existing values, norms and beliefs, the corporate institutions and their owners are consecrated as absolute beings which determine our life and death. This is why decrees legitimated by the “emergency”  are acceptable political means now.  This is why large corporations have gained enormous wealth.  This is why our lives are herded into the digital realm where we are commodified, conditioned to be exploited, and truncated to be stripped of the mystery of life and the unknown.

    But where do the anger and frustration go?

    The US establishment is well aware of the boiling anger and frustration over the situation.  The momentum of anger is cultivated and it is being shaped to put the people against each other—an old corporate duopoly trick, which has grown steadily as a dynamic tool of social engineering in the US.  The ghosts of the Civil War still determine the means of enslavement, while allowing the ruling class to preside over the theater of “democracy,” “freedom” and “humanity”—a manufactured “reality.”  Individualism, self-determination and a sense of freedom based on the sacrifices of many oppressed people are a privilege only allowed to people with economic security.  This is a part of the reason why the resistance against the Covid lockdown measures encompasses a reactionary element.  In particular, erroneously defining the trajectory as “socialism” or “communism”.  This ironic twist, the capitalist oppression being blamed on the enemy of capitalists, once again reveals the mechanism of the imperial duopoly as well as the expansion of the exploitative violence against a formerly economically secure segment of the population, which will require tighter measures of draconian restrictions.

    It is not a coincidence that the red states have embraced the opposing positions while the blue states firmly adhere to the official narratives on vaccines and lockdown measures.  The subject populations are allowed to choose the mode of enslavement, but the slight differences in the choice are big enough to activate colonial hatred toward each other.  The unresolved historical pain, emotion and grudge have found urgent expression against “enemies” among us.  A fight between teeth baring wolves and cunning foxes, as Malcom X would call it, channels the anger and frustration safely within the capitalist framework.  The media, politicians and major institutions carefully instigate conflicts among the people by demonizing opponents over vaccines and lockdown measures, while protecting “pandemic” narratives one way or the other.

    Some people might think that things must get worse before it gets better. Things can certainly get worse but it looks like it only means more fragmentation of communities and destabilization of institutions, which allows further erosion of people’s interests by the capitalist domination along with justifications for its draconian measures.  This probably gives a comfortable feeling for those privileged ones in gated communities. This also accompanies the exacerbation of fascist momentum, which always justifies the forces of western imperial hegemony—remember how the Trump phenomenon pushed neoliberal policies, which are embraced by both corporate parties, while justifying anything else to oppose Donald Trump, who was largely perceived as an obvious caricature of the narcissistic failing empire?  The US capitalism moves forward while oscillating left and right within the acceptable spectrum of imperialism.

    In short, everything is under control according to those who destroyed the middle eastern countries.  The only difference is that now the target is us.  We are under attack.  Some of us are demonized by the establishment to play the role of scapegoats.  Some of us are praised as heroes saving lives and sacrificing themselves. Our communities are being destroyed to be further consumed by the colonizers of humanity and nature.

    The war on virus is meant as a crucial background of destabilization and fear which helps extract huge amount of public spending in the name of saving lives, saving environment and saving people’s livelihoods—which are all under attack by the savagery of the very capitalist domination.   Since the war on virus is largely targeting the public money, we are bombarded with an unprecedented amount of wholesale propaganda narratives, as if we are thrown into the process of corporate electoral process—we are supposed to vote yes to those lucrative capitalist fixes for the capitalist problems by going along with the narratives.  Public outcries against the policies are safely consumed among the populations as people are forced to fight among themselves.

    Moreover, the war on virus is meant to be a perpetual war.  Inconceivable “mistakes” will be made, victories would be declared here and there, facts will be revealed when convenient, while much of the facts are distorted to prop up the pretense of this vast protection racket scheme by the oligarchs.  One step forward, and one step backward, our lives swirl within the torturous theater of the “medical crisis,” but the real solution is never to be found within it.  The empire can not lose the war but the empire has no intention of winning the war either, for the winning can destroy the domesticated momentum of the in-fighting among the people, as well as an assortment of “activism” backed by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which effectively drives capitalist agendas in the name of “our democracy”. After all, we are many. The oppressors are not.  The mechanism of the domestication must be kept in place to tame the masses within the feudal hierarchy of money and violence.  Meanwhile, fear, doubt and real threat against our livelihood in the form of economic strangulation continue to force us to swallow the protection racket deal with the criminal enterprise.

    Ultimately, the trajectory points to a complete domestication of our species through management of all means of production, its products, and the distribution system.  As the peoples become products themselves with biotech procedures, the social relations within the digital realm seamlessly merge with the fabricated reality, virtually cementing the feudal hierarchy of the absolute power.

    As we operate within social media outlets, as we present our identities within their frameworks, and as we are injected with GMO drugs to modify our physical response to the natural world, we have already stepped into a dangerous stage which might very well spell the end of our species as we know it.

    What could Iraqis do as they suffered the deadly embargo and invasions?  The question is ours now.  Unfortunately, many of those who stood with the empire are still insisting on fighting the imperial war as we have become the targets of the war, demonizing our community members as enemies, repeating slogans and talking points to justify the imperial restructuring, as our communities fall apart to be devoured by the colonizers.  It is no coincidence that those who oppose the current mobilization are accused of being racists, conspiracy theorists, or fascist worshippers—just as not agreeing with bombing brown people would be accused of letting brown children die by the hand of a “dictator.”

    Our real enemy is not the “antivaxxers,” or the gullible people swallowing the corporate propaganda.  The real enemy is the imperial oligarchs who are shaping our society in order to continue their ways of exploitation and subjugation.  They are shaping the capitalist cage to squeeze the last remnants of our imagination and our connection to humanity and nature.  How can we defy the colonization of humanity and nature?  How can we be a part of the resistance against the criminal pyramid scheme which is bound to implode with its destructive nature?  How can we build our ways to be in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with nature?  We are a part of the countless people who have held the dream of such a harmony.  We stand strong with them in solidarity.  We are many. The oppressors are not.

    The post We Are Many:  the Oppressors are not first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sha'Carrie Richardson looks perfect and unbothered as she destroys her competition during a race

    Right now, Sha’Carri Richardson should be running toward her Olympic dream, but she’s not because of a harmful drug war practice: drug testing.

    In June 2021, Richardson made headlines as one of the fastest women in the United States with her 100-meter sprint performance in the U.S. Olympic Trials. Less than two weeks later, she tested positive for THC, received a one-month suspension from competition, and was later excluded from the U.S. Olympic Team.

    While many racial justice and policy advocates were outraged by how Richardson’s positive marijuana test was handled, her experience was just the most visible instance of a deeply rooted practice that has harmed countless people for decades.

    For the past 35 years, drug testing has been an essential, yet largely under-examined, pillar of the “war on drugs.” Drug testing was widely adopted following the Drug-Free Workplace Act in 1988 under the false pretense of making workplaces safer and “drug-free.” In reality, these tests do nothing to show current impairment and are used as grounds for termination. They are disproportionately used to deny care and to target, surveil and criminalize Black people.

    Richardson’s case reveals a deeper truth — drug testing has become far too pervasive and normalized, even in situations where it is clear that it is not tied to performance or safety. For example, the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) has claimed that marijuana is banned primarily due to pressure from the White House, not because of concerns for athletes’ well-being or integrity in sports. But drug testing wasn’t always a part of our lives and we don’t have to continue to accept it now.

    People should never be drug tested for any drug, for any reason, that can lead to punitive consequences, regardless of which drugs they use and why they use them. Even drug testing for safety-sensitive positions, like those involving machine operating or medical procedures, cannot detect on-the-job impairment. Workplace accidents are often associated with stress, fatigue and illness rather than with drug use, and alternative assessment methods, including ongoing performance evaluations or performance-based tests, would more accurately and ethically measure current impairment.

    We should channel the outrage we feel about Richardson’s punitive treatment toward the institutions that subject many people to this kind of draconian surveillance every day.

    Take the public benefits system, for example. Applicants to the federally established Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are targeted by testing, whether they use drugs or not. Thirteen states authorize drug testing of TANF recipients. In most of those states, a positive drug test means sanctions and losing benefits altogether. These drug testing policies most acutely target Black people, who are disproportionately likely to be sanctioned and disproportionately poor. The impact of these sanctions? Increased risk of hunger, eviction and homelessness, utility shut-off and inadequate health care.

    Within the family regulation system (commonly referred to as the “child welfare system”), many doctors routinely drug test pregnant people and newborns, often without verbal or written consent. Although a drug test cannot indicate how much of a drug someone has used, whether someone is currently impaired or under the influence, or whether any harm has stemmed from that use, a positive drug test can lead to a newborn child being ripped from their parents’ arms despite no evidence of harm to the child. Who are the primary targets of pre- and post-natal drug testing? Black women and their newborns, who by one estimate are 1.5 times more likely to be drug tested than non-Black women. Meanwhile, favorable media representations abound of white middle-class and wealthy parents using marijuana.

    The selective use of drug testing in contexts that disproportionately target Black people, particularly poor Black people, while white people openly admit to using marijuana and sing its many benefits, highlights the extreme double standard around drugs, where some of us are trusted to use responsibly and others are portrayed as deviant rulebreakers. People of all races use drugs at similar rates, but enforcement in these areas parallels all tools of the drug war — it’s never about the drug. It’s about the perceived user.

    Has drug testing achieved any of the purported goals of reducing drug-related accidents and harm? No, because, as noted earlier, drug testing only detects past use and not current impairment.

    Has it decreased overdose deaths? No, criminalization and drug prohibition haven’t made us safer and have instead produced generational trauma and devastation and have fueled an overdose crisis.

    Has it connected people with services? No, surveillance and the threat of punishment deter people from seeking care and block people from much-needed nutritional, financial and medical support.

    People don’t “fail” drug tests. Drug testing fails us.

    We should not accept that the systems that are meant to provide support — like health care and public benefits — are denying care based on drug use and dictating what we can and cannot put into our bodies. This is how insidious the drug war is: It can be used to deny jobs, tear apart families and block public benefits in a time of need.

    A different world is possible, and people who use drugs are already envisioning it. Ending drug testing would disrupt the broader web of drug war surveillance, getting us closer to that future: one where we can all be open about our drug use; where people can choose to use drugs for a multitude of reasons, including pleasure; where Black people, people of color and other marginalized people aren’t targeted and punished for real or suspected drug use; where people can access the supports they desire without fear; and where the drug war, in all its forms, is abolished.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.

    ― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(

    It is time to recalibrate the government.

    For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

    By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

    We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

    This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

    These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

    That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

    Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

    This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

    “The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

    Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

    There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

    The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

    So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

    It won’t be easy.

    We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

    This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

    We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

    We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

    We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

    In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

    That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

    In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

    The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

    Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

    We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

    Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

    Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

    Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

    As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

    Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.

    We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

    We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.

    What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

    In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

    These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

    This way lies madness.

    Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

    How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

    There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

    Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

    That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.

    The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  •  

    Elizabeth Eckford tries to attend Little Rock Central High, September 4, 1957

    Little Rock, 1957

    This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue.

          CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3

     

    Mobile Surveillance

    (image: EFF)

    Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

          CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3

    The post Luke Harris on Critical Race Theory, Cindy Cohn on Pegasus Spyware appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • What the FBI didn’t say at the time was that at least a dozen participants in the “plot” were FBI informants, while one of the plot’s “planners” was an active-duty FBI agent.  The accused are now arguing in court that they were entrapped.  They likely were. While the courts already have ruled in similar cases that that is not a defense, it is the way the FBI does business.  The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the “war on domestic terrorism,” and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people.

    The post The Same FBI appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Will Cathcart is the chief executive of WhatsApp, the downloadable messaging app used by millions around the world as a primary means of communication. WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption, meaning messages shared via the platform are, under normal circumstances, highly secure—a feature that has made it attractive for journalists, human rights defenders, and other vulnerable users, particularly in repressive environments.

    Cathcart has been outspoken about threats to security, including so-called backdoors, which governments argue would give law enforcement much-needed access to encrypted communications, but which would also be vulnerable to malicious hacking. Cathcart has also been highly critical of the NSO Group, the Israeli firm that has marketed Pegasus spyware to governments around the world. Pegasus can be surreptitiously implanted on smartphones, giving governments unfettered access to all communications on the phone—and bypassing the encryption that WhatsApp and other secure apps like Signal apply to messages in transit.

    NSO group says Pegasus is a critical tool that governments use to combat crime and terror. But a recent report dubbed the Pegasus Project—published jointly by 17 media organizations and based on a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers allegedly selected by NSO clients—revealed that possible targets included hundreds of journalists and human rights defenders, not to mention senior political leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron.

    NSO has told CPJ it has no connection to the list of phone numbers, that it vets all clients and investigates credible allegations of abuse, and that it cannot access customer data except in the course of an investigation. In a statement to the Guardian, the company denied that Macron had been targeted by any of its customers.

    CPJ spoke with Cathcart via Zoom on July 23. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. NSO’s responses relating to some of his comments appear at the end.

    Right after the Pegasus Project was published, you put out a tweet storm. You posted a thread with your own reaction and you retweeted some interesting folks, everyone from David Kaye to Edward Snowden. Tell me why you responded the way you did.

    The issue of spyware, especially unaccountable spyware, is a huge problem. And it’s being used to undermine freedom. We detected and defeated an attack from NSO Group in 2019. And we worked with Citizen Lab who helped us analyze the 1,400 or so victims we saw then, and discovered over 100 cases of clear abuse, including journalists and human rights defenders. The new reporting shows the much, much larger scale of the problem. This should be a wake-up call for security on the internet.

    You mentioned the 2019 attack, which resulted in WhatsApp filing a lawsuit [in U.S. federal court] against the NSO Group. Your Washington Post op-ed in which you lay out the rationale is pinned to the top of your Twitter feed. What made you decide to take on the NSO Group?

    When we saw the attack and defeated it in 2019, we decided we needed to get to the bottom of what had happened. These were not, as has been claimed, clear law enforcement operations. This was out-of-control abuse.

    We felt we needed to be very loud about what we saw, because we knew that even if we had fixed the issue, there still exist vulnerabilities in people’s mobile phones. The operating systems have bugs that are still being exploited. So even though we’d stopped the attack from our perspective, it’s still a problem. If you’re a journalist, if you’re a human rights defender, if you’re a political dissident, you still have to be worried. So yeah, absolutely, we sued the NSO Group. They broke the law. We want to hold them accountable. We think their behavior needs to be stopped.

    There’s clearly a business interest here. One of the selling points of end-to-end encryption is the security that it provides. If there’s spyware out there that’s seeking to subvert that security, it’s a threat to the business model. But do you see this as a matter of principle as well? How do those two things relate to each other?

    This is a threat to end democracy. What we offer is a service for having private, secure communication. The reason everyone at WhatsApp gets up every day excited about working on that and fighting to defend it, is we believe it enables really important things. We believe journalists being able to talk to each other, and [to] sources, [to] bring out critical stories on governments or companies is a fundamental element of a democracy. We believe, in democracy, you need to have opposition. We believe human rights defenders all around the world do really, really important work. WhatsApp is popular in a lot of countries around the world that don’t have as robust traditions of freedom and liberal democracy. We’re popular in a lot of places where the ability to communicate securely is critical to someone’s safety.

    You’ve been very outspoken about your concerns. What would you like to see from the tech community at large?

    I would love to see all the other tech companies stand up, talk about this problem, talk about the victims, talk about the principles at stake, and do everything they can to put a stop to it. I was really excited to see Microsoft, when they discovered some spyware from a different company a few weeks ago, they were loud about it. They worked with Citizen Lab to understand the victims. I think that needs to be the model. I don’t think it is okay, when you find these vulnerabilities and you find these attacks to say, “Well, it’s disappointing, but it only affected a few people.” An attack on journalists, an attack on human rights defenders, an attack on political figures in democracies, that affects us all.

    You’ve recognized the communications needs of journalists and human rights defenders, particularly those working in high-risk environments. But some security experts believe that phones just aren’t secure anymore. Do you still feel confident that WhatsApp is a secure form of communication for vulnerable individuals, given this emerging security threat of spyware?

    Well, the mobile phone is the computer for most people. It’s the only computer most people have ever experienced. We need to make it secure. We need mobile operating systems to invest a lot more in security to fix these vulnerabilities. That’s why we defend end-to-end encryption [and] privacy. This is a moment where governments should stop asking us to weaken end-to-end encryption. That is a horrible idea. We have seen the damage that comes from this spyware with the security we have today. We should be having conversations about increasing security.

    Within WhatsApp, your messages are extremely secure when they’re being delivered from you to the person you’re talking to. What other forms of security can we add? I’m not sure it’s good for everyone to keep a copy of every conversation on their phone forever. Because what if your phone gets stolen? What if someone forces you to open the phone for them? So we added, late last year, the ability for you to have messages disappear after a week. If someone gets your phone, all you have is the last week’s worth of messages.

    We haven’t added this yet, but we’re working on the ability for you to send a photo that the recipient can only see once. We’re working on the ability for you to change a setting in your WhatsApp account to say, “I want every thread that I create, or that someone creates with me, to disappear by default.” I think there’s a lot more we can do to help protect people – but it takes the whole industry saying, “We need to make the phone secure.”

    You’ve called for import controls and other kinds of regulations to rein in a spyware industry that’s out of control. But if you look at the way technology develops, things get cheaper and easier over time. What makes you think that even if the current generation of spyware purveyors are somehow put out of business, they won’t be replaced by others who are even more ruthless? Or by state level technology from Russia, China, the U.S. for that matter? Can the spyware threat be defeated through regulation or import controls?

    Well, I think all of it helps. If you think about people breaking into our homes, obviously that’s still a problem. But we have locks on the doors. We have burglar alarms. We also have accountability. If someone breaks into my home, hopefully I can go to the police, I can go to the government, they’ll hold them accountable. If governments were actually holding people accountable when [spyware attacks] happen – that makes a huge difference. There will always be bad people out there. There will always be hostile governments out there. You’ve got to have as much security as possible in defense.

    You’ve emphasized WhatsApp’s commitment to privacy, to operating within the human rights framework. But WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. You worked at Facebook for many years. Facebook is involved in a huge public controversy, and was recently accused by President Biden of “killing people [in relation to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation].” Their business model is based on monetizing data. And there’s a huge amount of concern about misinformation circulating on the platform. Of course, people raise those concerns about WhatsApp as well. Does the relationship with Facebook complicate your messaging about privacy and human rights?

    We added end-to-end encryption to WhatsApp as part of Facebook. We’ve been very consistent on that and very supportive across the whole company – about the importance of that, why that’s the right thing, why that protects people’s fundamental rights, including journalists. Obviously, there are a lot of issues. But they’re different products. Take misinformation, for example. The question of what you do about misinformation on a large public social network is very different from how you should approach it on a private communication service. We think on a private communications service, you should have the right to talk to someone else privately, securely without a government listening in, and without a company looking at it. That’s different than if you’re broadcasting something out to every single person on a public social network.

    We’ve talked today about spyware. But are backdoors an even greater threat to secure online communication?

    Absolutely. Security experts who’ve looked at this agree. If you look at the threat from spyware, they’re having to go to each phone individually and compromise it. If you talk about holding a backdoor into any encryption, you are creating a centralized vulnerability in the whole communications network. And the scenario you need to be worried about is: what if a spyware company, what if a hostile government, what if a hacker, accessed all of the communications? It’s why, honestly, the proposals from some governments to weaken end-to-end corruption are just terrifying. They aren’t grappling with the nightmare scenario of everyone’s communications in a country being compromised.

    If this was a big wake up call, what are you planning to do next? What should the industry do next? What can people who are concerned about this do to fight back?

    We’re continuing to add security and privacy to WhatsApp, continuing our lawsuit in our push against NSO Group. We’re hoping more of the industry joins, and that more of the industry is loud about the problem. But what’s most important is governments. Governments need to step in and say this was not okay. Who was behind it? Who were the victims? What’s the accountability? Governments need to step in and have a complete moratorium on the spyware industry. It’s got to stop.

    [Editor’s note: CPJ emailed NSO with a request for comment on the WhatsApp lawsuit and the attack Cathcart attributed to NSO, but did not hear back before publication. The company denied the WhatsApp allegations when the lawsuit was announced, as CPJ noted at the time, and is challenging the suit in court, arguing it should be immune on grounds that its clients are foreign governments, according to the Guardian.]


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.