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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/we_the_targeted_how_the_government_weaponizes_surveillance_to_silence_its_critics

We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.

Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.

Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government. 

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https://brownstone.org/articles/are-we-facing-lockdowns-2-0/

Are We Facing Lockdowns 2.0?

National Public Radio was in a frenzy this morning but it felt like the movie Groundhog Day: they were spreading tremendous alarm about the rise of Covid cases. We have to stop the spread, the announcer said, and that’s why masks are coming back to classrooms. However, they added, relief is on the way in the form of a new vaccine. 

Rinse, repeat – as the shampoo bottles say. 

This line of thinking – stop the spread to reduce strain on hospitals, mask up, and so on – is being echoed by all major media organs. Leading the way is of course the New York Times. 

I’m a bit superstitious about stories in the New York Times designed to drum up disease panic. It was February 28, 2020, when this paper threw out one hundred years of editorial policy on infectious disease to counsel panic over calm, thus paving the way for what would come two weeks later: the astonishing wreckage of Covid lockdowns and everything that entailed. 

There was a reason the Times was chosen to be the first media outlet to take this line on Covid. It would be exceedingly naive to think that this was driven by an independent editorial judgment. Someone likely put them up to it. 

Regardless, I knew that day that the darkness was falling, that this was likely the beginning of a grand experiment in public health that would not only fail to achieve its aims but also wreck American liberty and prosperity. After all, sectors of the ruling class had been gaming pandemics for twenty years. They needed to justify the endless hours and billions put into the grand project of pandemic planning. 

The result was a calamity without precedent. We are nowhere near recovered. Substantial numbers of people today fear lockdowns far more than Covid, and for very good reasons. It was the crisis of our lives. 

Even more striking, we’ve yet to have a reckoning. The people in charge today are the same people who did this or their direct successors. There have been no apologies but rather quite the reverse. They worked hard to codify lockdowns as the preferred policy for pandemics, and we have every reason to suspect that they will repeat the experience if they can get away with it. 

That’s why my heart jumped a beat at the above-the-fold headline in the Times yesterday morning.

This happens at the same time we are getting more reports of new mask mandates, school closures, and the rollout of a new Covid vaccine invented by the usual suspects that President Biden has personally suggested that every American take. From all appearances, it does seem like another lockdown could be coming, or perhaps they are just trying to scare us into the reminder that they can do it if they want to. 

Just this morning, the White House spokesman took to the lectern to warn Americans about ominous subvariant BA.2.86, not to be confused with all the other subvariants being tracked in a pseudoscientific track-and-trace operation being run by the usual suspects. 

The Washington Post was chosen to announce the terror behind this one. “While only about a dozen cases of the new BA.2.86 variant have been reported worldwide — including three in the United States — experts say this variant requires intense monitoring and vigilance that many of its predecessors did not. That’s because it has even greater potential to escape the antibodies that protect people from getting sick, even if you’ve recently been infected or vaccinated.”

You will notice that BA.2.86 is not on the current list. That only means it could be the worst yet, whatever that means. 

It will surely be added. And no doubt every commentator on TV in the coming months will have great expertise with all this coded gibberish, spouting off these letters and numbers like they are known friends while the rest of us stare at our screen in amazement at the flashy science these experts are tossing around. 

Our pro-lockdown friend and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb is already at it, letting all these subvariant names roll off his tongue on CNN and thus display his astonishing mastery over the microbial kingdom. . 

This could be the way in which Lockdown 2.0 will be different from 1.0. The last time, the main spokespeople like Deborah Birx spoke to us like children to make sure we got the message. The downside of that approach is that it invites regular people to comment on the wisdom of lockdowns. 

The next time around, they will be much more sciency about it, with all this talk of subvariants, R-naughts, hospitalization rates, wastewater examinations, and so on, and do so in ways that intimidate regular people into thinking our opinions cannot possibly matter much. 

Let’s take a closer look at this New York Times piece. 

“But for Americans who have become accustomed to feeling that the nation has moved beyond Covid,” the newspaper says, “the current wave could be a rude reminder that the emerging New Normal is not a world without the virus.”

Are we really continuing to imagine the goal of eradication still? That seemed to be the purpose of the lockdowns in the first place, if there was any goal at all. It’s utterly impossible to create a world in which there are no viruses. And actually such a world would be stunningly dangerous, for it is the presence of pathogens that themselves train the immune system in the art of resistance, same as exercise makes the body more healthy. 

Sadly, this was the great taboo subject for three years, and, as a result, there was almost no talk of natural immunity during the last Covid mania. And there has been little to no reckoning since those days about the meaning of endemicity, the failure to recommend repurposed drugs as therapeutics, and the positive contribution of widespread exposure to creating the public health benefit of stronger immune systems. All of these topics were denounced and then censored. Oddly, they still are. 

To this day, public health officials continue to pretend that they did everything right. Oh sure, they could have locked down earlier, forced masks earlier, and imposed vaccine mandates with much more ferocity. So far as they are concerned, this was their only failing. And they have no intention of making those supposed mistakes again. 

In my own circles, everyone believes that they will never get away with it all again simply because there is too much resistance. I’m not so optimistic actually. Let’s say that 20 percent of the population is still convinced of the entire Covid religion. These people working with media and Big Tech, combined with daily propaganda from Covid, might be enough to overcome a large portion of the public that swears they will not comply this time. 

Honestly, I never believed they would get away with it the first time. How in the world do you convince Catholic Bishops to demand the closure of Churches on Easter under the excuse of the widespread circulation of a virus with a 99-plus percent survival rate in which the verified deaths from Covid alone is centered on a population older than life expectancy itself? I never could have imagined such a thing would be possible. 

But the desire on the part of aspirational professionals – in academia, industry, and religion – to stay out of trouble and continue to ascend the ranks is so powerful as to cause multitudes to bury their best instincts for what they imagine will be a temporary but prudent compliance. I do not for a moment believe that bravery on the level of the Amish or the Hasidim is widespread enough in the population to create a mass resistance movement. 

“Some institutions have responded to the recent increase in Covid infections by reinstating pandemic-era rules,” writes the Times. Then the article proceeds to celebrate all the cases of pandemic restrictions, without a hint that these didn’t work last time and won’t work this time either. Again, there has been no reckoning, which only increases the likelihood of a new round of lockdowns. 

Lockdowns were the most successful state/corporate policy in world history for convincing the population to give up volition, liberty, and money to the biomedical cartels and all its associated parts. 

Every government benefitted and so did all the biggest companies, particularly the digital ones that had been working for a leg up and a big win from the great reset. Something that is this monstrously successful for them becomes a model for the future, which they try and try until the population gets utterly and completely sick of it, as they did with the religious wars of old. 

Until that day comes, lockdowns will be an ever present threat. 

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http://endoftheamericandream.com/a-draconian-new-law-went-into-effect-on-august-25th-that-institutes-extreme-censorship-of-the-internet-on-a-global-basis/

A Draconian New Law Went Into Effect On August 25th That Institutes Extreme Censorship Of The Internet On A Global Basis

The Internet just changed forever, but most people living in the United States don’t even realize what just happened.  A draconian new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union on Friday, and it establishes an extremely strict regime of Internet censorship that is far more authoritarian than anything we have ever seen before.  From this point forward, hordes of European bureaucrats will be the arbiters of what is acceptable to say on the Internet.  If they discover something that you have said on a large online platform that they do not like, they can force that platform to take it down, because someone in Europe might see it.  So even though this is a European law, the truth is that it is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us.

From this point forward, nothing will be the same.  It is being reported that the DSA literally makes large tech companies “legally accountable for the content posted to them”…

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has officially gone into effect. Starting on August 25th, 2023, tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more must comply with sweeping legislation that holds online platforms legally accountable for the content posted to them.

Even though this new law was passed in the EU, we’ll likely see far-reaching global effects as companies adjust their policies to comply.

Initially, there will be 19 giant online platforms that will be forced to comply with this new law…

Ranging from social media platforms to online marketplaces and search engines, the list so far includes: Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Booking, AliExpress, Zalando, Google Shopping, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Google and Apple’s mobile app stores, Google’s Search, and Microsoft’s Bing.

But starting on February 24th, 2024, the Digital Services Act will start applying to a much broader spectrum of online platforms that have fewer than 45 million monthly users.

We are being told that this new law will establish clear rules that online platforms must follow.

That will include censoring anything that is deemed “false or misleading” under the Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation…

So what kind of speech is the DSA expected to police? Last year’s Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation defines disinformation as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm.” The code has already been put to work during elections and to “respond to crises,” such as COVID and the war in Ukraine.

And it really doesn’t matter if material that European bureaucrats consider to be “false or misleading” is actually “false of misleading” at all.

What matters is that if online platforms do not comply with what they are being told to do, they will pay dearly…

Online platforms that don’t comply with the DSA’s rules could see fines of up to 6 percent of their global turnover. According to the EU Commission, the Digital Services Coordinator and the Commission will have the power to “require immediate actions where necessary to address very serious harms.” A platform continually refusing to comply could result in a temporary suspension in the EU.

Big tech companies will be desperate to avoid such penalties, and so they will obey.

And so that means that “hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats” will be in control of speech on the Internet now…

Under this Orwellian regime, a team of hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats will decide what constitutes disinformation and instruct Big Tech firms to censor it. The firms themselves, faced with reputational risk and financial penalties, will have little choice other than to comply. This can be done in all manner of ways: simply by human moderators removing content, by shadow-banning problematic creators to reduce their reach, by demonetising certain content, and by tweaking algorithms to favour or disfavour certain topics. And though, legally speaking, the DSA only applies in the EU, once installed inside Big Tech firms, this vast content-regulation apparatus will surely affect users in the rest of the world, too.

We are being told that these EU bureaucrats will also be working with “trusted flaggers” to help identify content that needs to be censored…

The DSA’s “trusted flaggers” are entities with proven expertise in flagging harmful or illegal content to platforms. The new regulation provides that their content flagging shall be prioritised by platforms when moderating content.

You might be tempted to think that you will be able to avoid all of this censorship because you do not live in Europe.

Unfortunately, that is simply not true.

If you post something that someone in Europe might see, your content comes under the jurisdiction of this horrifying new law.

So you need to brace yourself for a level of Internet censorship that none of us have ever seen before.

In addition, most of the large tech companies that must comply with this new law are based in the United States.

And it turns out that the Federal Trade Commission actually sent officials to Europe in March to assist with the implementation of this new law on U.S. soil…

U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today sent letters to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan and the head of the European Union’s San Francisco office, demanding answers regarding the degree of coordination between the FTC and the EU to enforce the EU’s Digital Services Act (“DSA”) and Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) on U.S. soil. Both foreign laws were written to weaken American tech companies, particularly in Europe. There are no corollary federal laws to the DSA and DMA, making the FTC’s efforts to conspire with foreign regulators against U.S. businesses unprecedented.

The FTC announced in March that it was sending agency officials to Brussels to assist the EU in implementing these laws, while the EU opened a San Francisco office to pressure U.S tech companies to comply with them.

From this point forward, it is going to become much more difficult to share alternative views on the Internet.

Personally, there will be certain things that I will only be able to share in my books or with the paid subscribers of my Substack newsletter.

I am going to need to be more careful about what I share from now on, because if I say something publicly on the Internet that offends the bureaucrats in Europe, I could get into really big trouble.

And that is going to apply to every other independent journalist as well.

For a long time, the Internet allowed ordinary people like you and ordinary people like me to share truth with a world that was desperate for it.

But now the gatekeepers are exerting a draconian level of control, and the Internet will never, ever be the same again.