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Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

Slouching towards dystopia: the rise of surveillance capitalism and the death of privacy

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Our lives and behaviour have been turned into profit for the Big Tech giants – and we meekly click “Accept”. How did we sleepwalk into a world without privacy?

By John Naughton

Source: New Statesman

Suppose you walk into a shop and the guard at the entrance records your name. Cameras on the ceiling track your every step in the store, log which items you looked at and which ones you ignored. After a while you notice that an employee is following you around, recording on a clipboard how much time you spend in each aisle. And after you’ve chosen an item and bring it to the cashier, she won’t complete the transaction until you reveal your identity, even if you’re paying cash.

Another scenario: a stranger is standing at the garden gate outside your house. You don’t know him or why he’s there. He could be a plain-clothes police officer, but there’s no way of knowing. He’s there 24/7 and behaves like a real busybody. He stops everybody who visits you and checks their identity. This includes taking their mobile phone and copying all its data on to a device he carries. He does the same for family members as they come and go. When the postman arrives, this stranger insists on opening your mail, or at any rate on noting down the names and addresses of your correspondents. He logs when you get up, how long it takes you to get dressed, when you have meals, when you leave for work and arrive at the office, when you get home and when you go to bed, as well as what you read. He is able to record all of your phone calls, texts, emails and the phone numbers of those with whom you exchange WhatsApp messages. And when you ask him what he thinks he’s doing, he just stares at you. If pressed, he says that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. If really pressed, he may say that everything he does is for the protection of everyone.

A third scenario: you’re walking down the street when you’re accosted by a cheery, friendly guy. He runs a free photo-framing service – you just let him copy the images on your smartphone and he will tidy them up, frame them beautifully and put them into a gallery so that your friends and family can always see and admire them. And all for nothing! All you have to do is to agree to a simple contract. It’s 40 pages but it’s just typical legal boilerplate – the stuff that turns lawyers on. You can have a copy if you want. You make a quick scan of the contract. It says that of course you own your photographs but that, in exchange for the wonderful free framing service, you grant the chap “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free and worldwide licence to host, use, distribute, modify, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works” of your photos. Oh, and also he can change, suspend, or discontinue the framing service at any time without notice, and may amend any of the agreement’s terms at his sole discretion by posting the revised terms on his website. Your continued use of the framing service after the effective date of the revised agreement constitutes your acceptance of its terms. And because you’re in a hurry and you need some pictures framed by this afternoon for your daughter’s birthday party, you sign on the dotted line.

All of these scenarios are conceivable in what we call real life. It doesn’t take a nanosecond’s reflection to conclude that if you found yourself in one of them you would deem it preposterous and intolerable. And yet they are all simple, if laboured, articulations of everyday occurrences in cyberspace. They describe accommodations that in real life would be totally unacceptable, but which in our digital lives we tolerate meekly and often without reflection.

The question is: how did we get here?

***

It’s a long story, but with hindsight the outlines are becoming clear. Technology comes into it, of course – but plays a smaller part than you might think. It’s more a story about human nature, about how capitalism has mutated to exploit digital technology, about the liberal democratic state and the social contract, and about governments that have been asleep at the wheel for several decades.

To start with the tech: digital is different from earlier general-purpose technologies in a number of significant ways. It has zero marginal costs, which means that once you have made the investment to create something it costs almost nothing to replicate it a billion times. It is subject to very powerful network effects – which mean that if your product becomes sufficiently popular then it becomes, effectively, impregnable. The original design axioms of the internet – no central ownership or control, and indifference to what it was used for so long as users conformed to its technical protocols – created an environment for what became known as “permissionless innovation”. And because every networked device had to be identified and logged, it was also a giant surveillance machine.

Since we humans are social animals, and the internet is a communications network, it is not surprising we adopted it so quickly once services such as email and web browsers had made it accessible to non-techies. But because providing those services involved expense – on servers, bandwidth, tech support, etc – people had to pay for them. (It may seem incredible now, but once upon a time having an email account cost money.) Then newspaper and magazine publishers began putting content on to web servers that could be freely accessed, and in 1996 Hotmail was launched (symbolically, on 4 July, Independence Day) – meaning that anyone could have email for free.

Hotmail quickly became ubiquitous. It became clear that if a business wanted to gain those powerful network effects, it had to Get Big Fast; and the best way to do that was to offer services that were free to use. The only thing that remained was finding a business model that could finance services growing at exponential rates and provide a decent return for investors.

That problem was still unsolved when Google launched its search engine in 1998. Usage of it grew exponentially because it was manifestly better than its competitors. One reason for its superiority was that it monitored very closely what users searched for and used this information to improve the algorithm. So the more that people used the engine, the better it got. But when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Google was still burning rather than making money and its two biggest venture capital investors, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, started to lean on its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to find a business model.

Under that pressure they came up with one in 2001. They realised that the data created by their users’ searches could be used as raw material for algorithms that made informed guesses about what users might be interested in – predictions that could be useful to advertisers. In this way what was thought of as mere “data exhaust” became valuable “behavioural surplus” – information given by users that could be sold. Between that epiphany and Google’s initial public offering in 2004, the company’s revenues increased by over 3,000 per cent.

Thus was born a new business model that the American scholar Shoshana Zuboff later christened “surveillance capitalism”, which she defined as: “a new economic order that claims human experience as the raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales”. Having originated at Google, it was then conveyed to Facebook in 2008 when a senior Google executive, Sheryl Sandberg, joined the social media giant. So Sandberg became, as Zuboff puts it, the “Typhoid Mary” who helped disseminate surveillance capitalism.

***

The dynamic interactions between human nature and this toxic business model lie at the heart of what has happened with social media. The key commodity is data derived from close surveillance of everything that users do when they use these companies’ services. Therefore, the overwhelming priority for the algorithms that curate users’ social media feeds is to maximise “user engagement” – the time spent on them – and it turns out that misinformation, trolling, lies, hate-speech, extremism and other triggers of outrage seem to achieve that goal better than more innocuous stuff. Another engagement maximiser is clickbait – headlines that intrigue but leave out a key piece of information. (“She lied all her life. Guess what happened the one time she told the truth!”) In that sense, social media and many smartphone apps are essentially fuelled by dopamine – the chemical that ferries information between neurons in our brains, and is released when we do things that give us pleasure and satisfaction.

The bottom line is this: while social media users are essential for surveillance capitalism, they are not its paying customers: that role is reserved for advertisers. So the relationship of platform to user is essentially manipulative: he or she has to be encouraged to produce as much behavioural surplus as possible.

A key indicator of this asymmetry is the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) that users are required to accept before they can access the service. Most of these “contracts” consist of three coats of prime legal verbiage that no normal human being can understand, and so nobody reads them. To illustrate the point, in June 2014 the security firm F-Secure set up a free WiFi hotspot in the centre of London’s financial district. Buried in the EULA for this “free” service was a “Herod clause”: in exchange for the WiFi, “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people accepted the terms.  In another experiment, a software firm put an offer of an award of $1,000 at the very end of its terms of service, just to see how many would read that far. Four months and 3,000 downloads later, just one person had claimed the offered sum.

Despite this, our legal systems accept the fact that most internet users click  “Accept” as confirmation of informed consent, which it clearly is not. It’s really passive acceptance of impotence. Such asymmetric contracts would be laughed out of court in real life but are still apparently sacrosanct in cyberspace.

According to the security guru Bruce Schneier of Harvard, “Surveillance is the business model of the internet.” But it’s also a central concern of modern states. When Edward Snowden broke cover in the summer of 2013 with his revelations of the extensiveness and scale of the surveillance capabilities and activities of the US and some other Western countries, the first question that came to mind was: is this a scandal or a crisis? Scandals happen all the time in democracies; they generate a great deal of heat and controversy, but after a while the media caravan moves on and nothing happens. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to substantive reform.

Snowden revealed that the US and its allies had been engaged in mass surveillance under inadequate democratic oversight. His disclosures provoked apparent soul-searching and anger in many Western democracies, but the degree of public concern varied from country to country. It was high in Germany, perhaps because so many Germans have recent memories of Stasi surveillance. In contrast, public opinion in Britain seemed relatively relaxed: opinion surveys at the time suggested that about two-thirds of the British public had confidence in the security services and were thus unruffled by Snowden. Nevertheless, there were three major inquiries into the revelations in the UK, and, ultimately, a new act of parliament – the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This overhauled and in some ways strengthened judicial oversight of surveillance activities by the security services; but it also gave those services significant new powers  – for example in “equipment interference”  (legal cover to hack into targeted devices such as smartphones, domestic networks and “smart” devices such as thermostats). So, in the end, the impact of the Snowden revelations was that manifestly inadequate oversight provisions were replaced by slightly less inadequate ones. It was a scandal, not a crisis. Western states are still in the surveillance business; and their populations still seem comfortable with this.

There’s currently some concern about facial recognition, a genuinely intrusive surveillance technology. Machine-learning technology has become reasonably good at recognising faces in public places, and many state agencies and private companies are already deploying it. It means that people are being identified and tracked without their knowledge or consent. Protests against facial recognition are well-intentioned, but, as Harvard’s Bruce Schneier points out, banning it is the wrong way to oppose modern surveillance.

This is because facial recognition is just one identification tool among many enabled by digital technology. “People can be identified at a distance by their heartbeat or by their gait, using a laser-based system,” says Schneier. “Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris patterns from metres away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card numbers, the licence plates on our cars. China, for example, uses multiple identification technologies to support its surveillance state.”

The important point is that surveillance and our passive acceptance of it lies at the heart of the dystopia we are busily constructing. It doesn’t matter which technology is used to identify people: what matters is that we can be identified, and then correlated and tracked across everything we do. Mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries such as China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In Western countries, led by the US, it’s being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behaviour, and is then used incidentally by governments.

What’s happened in the West, largely unnoticed by the citizenry, is a sea-change in the social contract between individuals and the state. Whereas once the deal was that we accepted some limitations on our freedom in exchange for security, now the state requires us to surrender most of our privacy in order to protect us. The (implicit and explicit) argument is that if we have nothing to hide there is nothing to fear. And people seem to accept that ludicrous trope. We have been slouching towards dystopia.

***

The most eerie thing about the last two decades is the quiescence with which people have accepted – and adapted to – revolutionary changes in their information environment and lives. We have seen half-educated tech titans proclaim mottos such as “Move fast and break things” – as Mark Zuckerberg did in the early years of Facebook – and then refuse to acknowledge responsibility when one of the things they may have helped to break is democracy.  (This is the same democracy, incidentally, that enforces the laws that protect their intellectual property, helped fund the technology that has enabled their fortunes and gives them immunity for the destructive nonsense that is disseminated by their platforms.) And we allow them to get away with it.

What can explain such indolent passivity? One obvious reason is that we really (and understandably) value some of the services that the tech industry has provided. There have been various attempts to attach a monetary value to them, but any conversation with a family that’s spread over different countries or continents is enough to convince one that being able to Skype or FaceTime a faraway loved one is a real boon. Or just think of the way that Google has become a memory prosthesis for humanity – or how educational non-profit organisations such as the Khan Academy can disseminate learning for free online.

We would really miss these services if they were one day to disappear, and this may be one reason why many politicians tip-toe round tech companies’ monopoly power. That the services are free at the point of use has undermined anti-trust thinking for decades: how do you prosecute a  monopoly that is not price-gouging its users? (The answer, in the case of social media, is that users are not customers;  the monopoly may well be extorting its actual customers – advertisers – but nobody seems to have inquired too deeply into that until recently.)

Another possible explanation is what one might call imaginative failure – most people simply cannot imagine the nature of the surveillance society that we are constructing, or the implications it might have for them and their grandchildren. There are only two cures for this failure: one is an existential crisis that brings home to people the catastrophic damage that technology could wreak. Imagine, for example, a more deadly strain of the coronavirus that rapidly causes a pandemic – but governments struggle to control it because official edicts are drowned out by malicious disinformation on social media. Would that make people think again about the legal immunity that social media companies enjoy from prosecution for content that they host on their servers?

The other antidote to imaginative failure is artistic creativity. It’s no accident that two of the most influential books of the last century were novels – Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The first imagined a world in which humans were controlled by fear engendered by comprehensive surveillance; the second portrayed one in which citizens were undone by addiction to pleasure – the dopamine strategy, if you like. The irony of digital technology is that it has given us both of these nightmares at once.

Whatever the explanation, everywhere at the moment one notices a feeling of impotence – a kind of learned helplessness. This is seen most vividly in the way people shrug their shoulders and click “Accept” on grotesquely skewed and manipulative  EULAs. They face a binary choice: accept the terms or go away. Hence what has become known as the “privacy paradox” – whenever researchers and opinion pollsters ask internet users if they value their privacy, they invariably respond with a  resounding “yes”. And yet they continue to use the services that undermine that beloved privacy.

It hasn’t helped that internet users have watched their governments do nothing about tech power for two decades. Surveillance capitalism was enabled because its practitioners operated in a lawless environment. It appropriated people’s data as a free resource and asserted its right to do so, much as previous variations of capitalism appropriated natural resources without legal restrictions. And now the industry claims as one of its prime proprietary assets the huge troves of that appropriated data that it possesses.

It is also relevant that tech companies have been free to acquire start-ups that threatened to become competitors without much, if any, scrutiny from competition authorities. In any rational universe, Google would not be permitted to own YouTube, and Facebook would have to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram. It’s even possible – as the French journalist  Frédéric Filloux has recently argued – that  Facebook believes its corporate interests are best served by the re-election of Donald Trump, which is why it’s not going to fact-check any political ads. As far as I can see, this state of affairs has not aroused even a squawk in the US.

When Benjamin Franklin emerged on the final day of deliberation from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A republic… if you can keep it.” The equivalent reply for our tech-dominated society would be: we have a democracy, if we can keep it.

 

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

As long as the internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy” — a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon.

“Black people are routinely sent to “facebook jail” if their words anger racist white people.”

In its early days the internet seemed to be an undisputed good, a means of communication open to all. It was hoped that these new platforms would level the playing field and give smaller outlets like Black Agenda Report access to a worldwide audience. The internet has done that but it is also a weapon that is used against the left in this country and against nations and movements declared enemies by this government.

In the rush of enthusiasm one important fact was forgotten. The internet is in the hands of private corporations. They decide who gets service, where they get it and at what speed. The growth of social media only exacerbated the problems of corporate control.

This columnist uses Facebook and Twitter and other platforms by necessity. They are sources of information and important means of communication. But they are controlled by powerful corporate entities who work hand in hand with the government. Ultimately they decide who can be seen and who cannot.

“Private corporations decide who gets service, where they get it and at what speed.”

When the U.S. government speaks, Facebook and Twitter listen and then do as they are told. When foreign governments are declared adversaries their representatives and advocates are censored. In the past year, the Syrian government and the Venezuelan government have been temporarily blocked on Twitter. Sites such as Telesur have been repeatedly removed from Facebook. Numerous Palestinian advocacy sites have been removed from Facebook at the behest of the Israeli government.

Facebook decides if “community standards” have been violated and restrict anyone who violates their opaque rules. Black people are routinely sent to “facebook jail” if their words anger racist white people.

But the loss of access is not the biggest problem. When the United States government killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani they also wanted to kill off his memory. Facebook posts which spoke of him in any favorable light were removed. Facebook isn’t alone in joining the governmental directive. The Iranian English language service, Presstv, was removed from Youtube, which is owned by Google. Years of reporting and interviews, including some given by this columnist, disappeared into the black hole of cyberspace. When the U.S. began ratcheting up its maximum pressure, the corporate sector went right along and Presstv was sent down the memory hole.

“Presstv was removed from Youtube, which is owned by Google.”

Censorship has gotten worse because of liberals, not conservatives, and they have used the Russiagate fraud to accelerate the deplatforming process. Immediately after the 2016 election we were told that the Russian government was responsible for Trump’s victory and that censorship was the only thing standing between us and living under the control of Vladimir Putin.

The infamous Proporornot  list declared that Black Agenda Report and other sites were under Russian influence. Ever since that list was published in late 2016 many left sites lost visibility on Google and other search engines.

Now Trump administration sanctions are impacting our ability to communicate in a variety of ways. Not only were references to Soleimani removed, but the use of the word “Iran” can result in censorship and the inability to complete financial transactions. The Grayzone project  reported that Paypal restricted donations from anyone who mentioned the word Iran.

It must be repeated that Trump has plenty of help from Democrats and liberals in this regard. Pleas for Facebook “fact checking” will result in more censorship of black people and of anyone who happens to voice opinions that run counter to the imperialist narrative.

“The use of the word “Iran” can result in censorship.”

Already Russia is being blamed for election interference, yet Russia is not the target. The left is the target and Democrats are leading the charge. Their goal is to narrow discourse and to make war propaganda acceptable. It is an irony and a contradiction that while Trump is falsely accused of being under Russian influence, his policy goals are furthered with help from liberals. U.S. imperialism is a thoroughly bipartisan project.

This collusion between the wings of the duopoly must be kept in mind during the farcical impeachment. The Democrats could have added the war crime of the Soleimani assassination to their articles of impeachment. But they are complicit in this regard and will mention nothing of substance. Instead they have only one flimsy charge that is a cynical get out the vote effort and a source of anti-Russian propaganda.

As long as the internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy,” a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon. These platforms cannot be trusted unless or until they are publicly regulated. In the meantime, our reliance on them comes at a price.

Hovering in Cyberspace

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.”  An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions.  These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one.  The result is mass hallucination.

This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological “advances” are accepted as human destiny.  We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique – the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently – dominate the world. In such a world, not only does the end justify the means, but to consider such a moral issue is beside the point. We are speeding ahead to nowhere in the most “efficient” way possible.  No questioning allowed!  Unless you wish to ask your phone.

These days there is much political talk and commentary about fascism, tyranny, a police state, etc., while the totalitarianism of technocracy and technology continues apace.  It is not just the ecological (in the human/natural sense) impact of digital technology where one change generates many others in an endless spiral, but the fact that technical efficiency dominates all aspects of life and, as Jacques Ellul wrote long ago, “transforms everything it touches into a machine,” including humans.  For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological “solution” that creates further technological problems ad infinitum.  The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.

Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset.  He said,

In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both…In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design.

We are of course living with the ongoing results of such medical technical efficiency.  The U.S.A. is a country where the majority of people are drugged in one way or another, legally or illegally, since the human problems of living are considered to have only technological solutions, whether those remedies are effective or anodyne.  The “accidents” and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible.  We are caught in its web.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s – whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact – was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.

Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today’s message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void.  To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word – a private person.  Translation: one who is out of it, detached, at least temporarily, from the screens that separate us from reality, from the incessant noise and pinging messages that destroy reflection and create reflex reactions.

But to be out of it is the only way to understand it.  And to understand it is terrifying, for it means one knows that the religion of technology has replaced nature as the source of what for eons has been considered sacred. It means one grasps how reality is now defined by technology. It means realizing that people are merging with the machines they are attached to by invisible manacles as they replace the human body with abstractions and interact with machines.  It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporation and government forces intent on using it as a weapon to control people. It means seeing the truth that most people have never considered the price to be paid for the speed and efficiency of a high-tech world.

But the price is very, very high.

One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within – which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind’s most problematic tasks – because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.  As a result, a vicious circle has been created that prevents people from the crucial epistemological task of grasping the double-bind that is the ultimate propaganda.  Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp’s ridiculous work of Dada “art,” a urinal, but into the wind.  And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.  There is no time or space for grasping context or to connect the dots. It is a pointillist painting in the form of inert facts that few can understand or even realize that they don’t.

I am typing these words on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, a beautiful piece of technology whose sound and movement creates a rhythmic sanctuary where my hands, head, and heart work in unison. It allows me to think slowly, to make mistakes that will necessitate retyping, to do second and third rereadings and revisions, to roll the paper out of the machine and sit quietly as I review it.  My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.

Technology as such is not the problem, for my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world.  It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.  I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters.  The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one’s fate and that of all humanity.  It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.

But while this typing machine allows me to write in peace, I am in no way suggesting that I have escaped the technological condition that we all find ourselves in.  There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it.  I will eventually have to take my paper and type it into a computer document if I wish to publish it in the form you will be reading it.  There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, “inside the whale,” the whale in this case being a high-tech digital world controlled by technocrats, and we have only small ways to shield ourselves from it. Sitting in a quiet room, working on a typewriter, taking a walk in the woods without a cell phone, or not owning a cell phone, are but small individual acts that have no effect on the structural realty of what Neil Postman calls technopoly in his masterful book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.

Humans have always created and used technology, but for a very long time that technology was subject to cultural and religious rules that circumscribed limits to its use.  Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it.  The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.  In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can’t fathom but unconsciously fear.  Where are we heading? many probably wonder, as they check the latest news ping, no doubt about something to fear, as a thousand pieces of “news” flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand.  Incoherence is the result.  Speed is king.

Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation.  This is provided by what Jacques Ellul, in Presence in the Modern World, calls “the explanatory myth.”  He writes,

This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth.  In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system…Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer’s mind and enables everything to be explained.  This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.  It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena…this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness…enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience.  What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles…[they] have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens and whatever they do, they can rely on the explanation that myth provides.  This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.  They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of ‘mass persons’ who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.

Today that myth is the religion of technology.

So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.

Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.

Ask your computer why “nice” Americans will sit behind computer screens and send missiles to kill people half-way around the world whom they are told they are at war with.

Ask your smart device why so many have become little Eichmanns, carrying out their dutiful little tasks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and all the other war manufacturers, or not caring what stocks they own.

Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran.  See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane’s transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.

Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5 G wireless technology.

Ask that smart phone who is providing the non-answers.

Ask and it won’t be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden.  This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers.  It is a scam.

Google it!

God may respond.

Algorithmic Feudalism

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Stiegler insists, however, that authentic thinking and calculative thinking are not mutually exclusive; indeed, mathematical rationality is one of our major prosthetic extensions. But the catastrophe of the digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational “reason” and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself. 

– Via TruthDig: Fighting the Unprecedented ‘Proletarianization’ of the Human Mind

As the share price of Google parent company Alphabet soared to new highs in the U.S. equity market last week, several articles were published detailing just how out of control and dangerous this tech behemoth has become.

First, we learned Google is in the process of secretly sucking up the personalized healthcare data of up to 50 million Americans without the permission of patients or doctors. This was followed by a detailed report in the Wall Street Journal outlining how the search giant is meddling with its algorithms far more aggressively than executives lead people to believe. Despite these revelations, or more likely because of them, the stock price jumped to record levels. This is the world we live in.

We should’ve known right away that a tech company with the motto “don’t be evil,” would quickly and without any hesitation embrace as much evil as possible. Although pushback against America’s most dangerous tech giants (Google, Facebook and Amazon) has been growing, it hasn’t amounted to anything serious, and investors don’t expect much if the share price is any indication. Perhaps after seeing zero bank executives jailed after last decade’s financial crime spree, coupled with Boeing executives likewise facing no real repercussions despite killing hundreds out of profit-obsessed negligence, we’ve come to embrace our sociopathic, depraved overlords. Give me liberty, or give me new highs in the S&P500.

It’s important to note that while much of the recent focus on tech giants revolves around market dominance and anti-competitiveness, the real danger posed is far more extensive. Particularly since the post-election “panic of 2016,” these companies have begun to more earnestly morph into digital information gatekeepers in the name of empire and the national security state.

Day by day, tweaked algorithm by tweaked algorithm, and with each new thought criminal banished from major digital platforms, we’ve seen not only dissident views marginalized, but we’ve also lost a capacity to access information we’re looking for should tech company CEOs or their national security state partners deem it inappropriate. The powers that be have determined the internet permitted too much freedom of thought and opinion, so the tech giants stand ready to bluntly throw the hammer down in order to reverse that trend and regain narrative control. The algorithm will be used to get you in line, and if you don’t comply, the algorithm will destroy you.

More from TruthDig:

Stiegler believes that digital technology, in the hands of technocrats whom he calls “the new barbarians,” now threatens to dominate our tertiary memory, leading to a historically unprecedented “proletarianization” of the human mind. For Stiegler, the stakes today are much higher than they were for Marx, from whom this term is derived: proletarianization is no longer a threat posed to physical labor but to the human spirit itself…

Stiegler firmly believes that a distinction must always be upheld between “authentic thinking” and “computational cognitivism” and that today’s crisis lies in confusing the latter for the former: we have entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that now dominate everyday life, which is increasingly dependent on glowing screens driven by algorithmic anticipations of their users’ preferences and even writing habits (e.g., the repugnantly named “predictive text” feature that awaits typed-in characters to regurgitate stock phrases)… As Stiegler’s translator, the philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross, puts it, our so-called post-truth age is one “where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself.” 

This is the true crux of what we’re dealing with, and so we find ourselves at a terrifying transition point in the entire historical human experience should we fail to correct it. As a consequence of their dominant market shares in core areas of our modern digital world like e-commerce (Amazon), human-to-human communication (Facebook) and information access (Google), tech giants now have the capacity to replace human curiosity and thought with opaque and ever-changing algorithms.

Here’s some of what the WSJ revealed in its investigation published last week:

More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:

• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc.and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. 

• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.

• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics. 

• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism. 

• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.

This comes down to power and control, and the tech giants are now maturing into their predictable role as algorithmic gatekeepers of a new digital feudalism. Google has the power to shape your mind by limiting what you have access to, while at the same time wielding the power to destroy your livelihood with a tweak of an algorithm. Although a lot of the most nefarious stuff is still being conducted at the margins so the masses don’t realize what’s happening, stealth censorship will continue to be rolled out until the internet most people use becomes for all practical purposes an information gulag where nothing but shameless propaganda is pumped onto screens by hidden algorithms tweaked (for your own good) by billionaires.

A perfect example of this can be seen in how YouTube hides ones of the most popular videos ever made regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The short clip made by James Corbett, is titled 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory, and has over 3.2 million views. Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube spits out if you search by the exact title of the video.

Keep scrolling and you still won’t find it. This isn’t YouTube helping users find the information they want, it’s YouTube hiding content from its users. Moreover, the only reason I’m aware of the censoring of this particular item is because I’m familiar with the video from years ago. You can be certain this sort of thing is more common than you realize and will only get worse.

The internet was supposed to free information while connecting people and ideas across borders. This promise is being lost with each passing day, and rectifying the situation is one of the most significant challenges we face. Should we fail, we can look forward to a future where humanity consists of little more than digitally lobotomized automatons responding like lab rats to algorithms created by tech CEOs and their national security state partners.

 

Facebook and YouTube remove posts naming CIA impeachment whistleblower

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By Kevin Reed

Source: WSWS.org

Multiple media sources reported on Friday that the social media platforms Facebook and YouTube were removing posts that identified by name the CIA whistleblower behind the Congressional impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

In an email statement, Facebook said, “Any mention of the potential whistleblower’s name violates our coordinating harm policy, which prohibits content ‘outing of witness, informant or activist’,” adding, “We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate.”

CNN also reported that YouTube issued a statement saying that it was using a combination of artificial intelligence software and human monitors to find and delete videos with the name of the “Ukrainegate” whistleblower. “The removals, the spokesperson added, would affect the titles and descriptions of videos as well as the video’s actual content,” the CNN report said.

The World Socialist Web Site has independently confirmed that Facebook is deleting posts containing the name of alleged CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

Facebook’s claim that any content posted on its platform naming Ciaramella constitutes “outing” the whistleblower is absurd. The alleged identity of the career CIA analyst who filed a complaint regarding the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been known since October 30 when the pro-Republican Real Clear Politics website published his name.

When his name was published by Real Clear Politics, the whistleblower’s attorneys—in typical CIA fashion—said they could “neither confirm nor deny” that Ciaramella was their client.

Ciaramella is a plausible candidate for being whistleblower, given his background as a registered Democrat and CIA analyst with expertise in Ukraine and Russia. He worked under both Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. In mid-2017 he was sent back to the CIA amid accusations that he was leaking anti-Trump information to the media.

While Ciaramella’s name has been widely circulated by Republican political figures, right-wing news sites and former CIA analyst and Trump aide Fred Fleitz said, “everyone knows who he is,” the Democrats and their allies in the media at the New York Times, Washington Post and major television networks have not made his name public.

Even an article in the New York Times on Friday that reported on Facebook’s censoring of posts by the right-wing website Breitbart did not include Ciaramella’s name. By taking the step of scrubbing posts mentioning allegations that are widely shared and reported, Facebook and YouTube are now joining with these corporate media organizations and blocking the public from having access to important information.

The latest heavy-handed social media censorship—so obviously being carried out in the service of the Democratic Party impeachment inquiry and the CIA—actually helps the Trump administration, the Republican Party and the extreme right-wing political forces defending the White House, allowing them to adopt the false posture of advocating free flow of information, even as Trump continues to demonize the media as the “enemies of the people.”

The mass scrubbing of all social media content by Facebook and YouTube that mentions the name Eric Ciaramella is part of the broader censorship efforts by the technology monopolies, in collaboration with the intelligence state, and sets the stage for even more draconian attacks on freedom of expression.

This must be seen within the context of the drive by a substantial section of the ruling establishment for the social media platforms to “step up to the plate” and, as Hillary Clinton said last week, take down “false, deceptive or deliberately misleading content” or “pay a price.” Leading figures within the Democratic Party, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have been campaigning for social media censorship that will block what they call “untruthful statements.”

As explained on the World Socialist Web Site, the increasing calls for censorship on social media are part of a protracted campaign by the US intelligence apparatus, under conditions of a growing movement of the working class and young people and increasing interest and support for socialism, to suppress left-wing, antiwar and progressive political viewpoints.

Furthermore, the WSWS has pointed out that what is determined as “fake” or “real” is not to be decided by the government or giant tech monopolies: “All the dishonesty of the campaign for internet censorship is contained in the failure to answer, much less consider, one central question: Who is to determine what is true and what is false?”

The publication of the name of the CIA analyst who submitted his complaint memo to the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in August is not a crime. In fact, his identity is of substantial consequence, given that his complaint became the starting point of an effort to remove a sitting president through impeachment.

Internet Free Speech All But Dead

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Unelected, unnamed censors are operating across the Internet to suppress “unapproved” content.

By Philip Giraldi

Source: OpEdNews.com

The Internet was originally promoted as a completely free and uncensored mechanism for people everywhere to exchange views and communicate, but it has been observed by many users that that is not really true anymore. Both governments and the service providers have developed a taste for controlling the product, with President Barack Obama once considering a “kill switch” that would turn off the Internet completely in the event of a “national emergency.”

President Donald Trump has also had a lot to say about fake news and is reported to be supporting limiting protections relating to the Internet. In May, a “net neutrality” bill that would have prevented service providers from manipulating Internet traffic passed in the House of Representatives, but it is reported to be “dead on arrival” in the Senate, so it will never be enacted.

Social networking sites have voluntarily employed technical fixes that restrict some content and have also hired “reviewers” who look for objectionable material and remove it. Pending European legislation, meanwhile, might require Internet search engines to eliminate access to many unacceptable old posts. YouTube has already been engaged in deleting existing old material and is working with biased “partners” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to set up guidelines to restrict future content. Many users of Facebook will have already undoubtedly noted that some contacts have been blocked temporarily (or even permanently) and denied access to the site.

Google now automatically disables or limits searches for material that it deems to be undesirable. If Google does not approve of something it will either not appear in search results or it will be very low on the list. And what does come up will likely favor content that derives from those who pay Google to promote their products or services. Information that originates with competitors will either be very low in the search results or even blocked. Google is consequently hardly an unbiased source of information.

In May 2017 Facebook announced that it would be hiring 3,000 new censors, and my own experience of social networking censorship soon followed. I had posted an article entitled “Charlottesville Requiem” that I had written for a website. At the end of the first day, the site managers noticed that, while the article had clearly attracted a substantial Facebook readership, the “likes” for the piece were not showing up on the screen counter, i.e., were not being tabulated. It was also impossible to share the piece on Facebook, as the button to do so had been removed.

The “likes” on sites like Facebook, Yahoo! news comments, YouTube, and Google are important because they automatically determine how the piece is distributed throughout the site. If there are a lot of likes, the piece goes to the top when a search is made or when someone opens the page. Articles similarly can be sent to Coventry if they receive a lot of dislikes or negative marks, so the approvals or disapprovals can be very important in determining what kind of audience is reached or what a search will reveal.

In my case, after one day my page reverted to normal, the “likes” reappeared, and readers were again able to share the article. But it was clear that someone had been managing what I had posted, apparently because there had been disapproval of my content based on what must have been a political judgment.

A couple of days later, I learned of another example of a similar incident. The Ron Paul Institute (RPI) website posts much of its material on YouTube (owned by Google) on a site where there had been advertising that kicked back to RPI a small percentage of the money earned. Suddenly, without explanation, both the ads and rebate were eliminated after a “manual review” determined the content to be “unsuitable for all advertisers.” This was a judgment rendered apparently due to disapproval of what the institute does and says. The ability to comment on and link from the pieces was also turned off.

Dissident British former diplomat Craig Murray also noted in April 2018 the secretive manipulation of his articles that are posted on Facebook, observing that his “site’s visitor numbers [were] currently around one-third normal levels, stuck at around 20,000 unique visitors per day. The cause [was] not hard to find. Normally over half of our visitors arrive via Facebook. These last few days, virtually nothing has come from Facebook. What is especially pernicious is that Facebook deliberately imposes this censorship in a secretive way.

The primary mechanism when a block is imposed by Facebook is that my posts to Facebook are simply not sent into the timelines of the large majority of people who are friends or who follow. I am left to believe the post has been shared with them, but in fact it has only been shown to a tiny number. Then, if you are one of the few recipients and do see the post and share it, it will show to you on your timeline as shared, but in fact the vast majority of your own friends will also not receive it. Facebook is not doing what it is telling you it is doing — it shows you it is shared — and Facebook is deliberately concealing that fact from you. Twitter has a similar system known as ‘shadow banning.’ Again, it is secretive and the victim is not informed.”

More recently, pressure to censor Internet social networking and information sites has increased, coming both from government and from various interested constituencies. In late May, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss how to eliminate “hate speech” on the Internet. The two men agreed that the United States Internet model, in spite of already being heavily manipulated, is too laissez faire, and expressed an interest in exploring the French system where it is considered acceptable to ban unacceptable points of view. Zuckerberg suggested that it might serve as a good model for the entire European Union. France is reportedly considering legislation that establishes a regulator with power to fine Internet companies up to 4% of their global revenue, which can in some cases be an enormous sum, if they do not curb hateful expressions.

So unelected, unnamed censors are operating all around the Internet to control the content, which I suppose should surprise no one, and the interference will only get worse as both governments and service providers are willing to do what it takes to eliminate views that they find unacceptable — which, curiously enough, leads one to consider how “Russia-gate” came about and the current hysteria being generated in the conventional media and also online against both Venezuela and Iran. How much of the anger is essentially fake, being manipulated or even fabricated by large companies that earn mega billions of dollars by offering under false pretenses a heavily managed product that largely does what the government wants? Banning hate speech will be, unfortunately, only the first step in eliminating any and all criticisms of the status quo.

When the Journalists Ganged Up on Assange They Ganged Up on Themselves

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Journalists did not appreciate the implications for themselves of the contrived and false indictment of Julian Assange by a corrupt US government.  It was obvious to a few of us that the indictment by the US government, a government constrained by the First Amendment, of a foreign national for publishing leaked material, an action never before regarded as espionage or a crime, was the beginning of the end of any Western government ever again being held accountable by a free press.

Not that the Western World has a free press.  It has a collection of presstitutes that serve as a Ministry of Propaganda for the ruling oligarchies.

Still, in principle it was possible that governments could be held accountable.  But that possibility ended with Assange’s false indictment.

First of all, no honest government would have spent years trying to invent a way to indict a journalist for practicing journalism.

Second, no intelligent grand jurors with an ounce of integrity would have been putty in the hands of a corrupt US prosecutor and enable a prosecution that ensures the destruction of accountable government.

Third, it was obvious that once America led the way in shutting down the principle of a free press, governments of other “Western democracies” would follow as soon as they could.

And follow they did.  Assange’s indictment led to raids by the Australian Gestapo on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/05/more-police-raids-as-war-on-journalism-escalates-worldwide/  The Australian government is angry about an investigative report about war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian participants in Washington’s war against the Taliban. What Australian troops are doing in Afghanistan remains an unexplained mystery. How much is the Australian government being paid by Washington for Australian mercenaries to die for the American Empire?

The Gestapo raids soon spread to other Australian journalists, including one whose sin was to report on “asylum seekers.”

Assange’s contrived and false indictment has also encouraged the French police to arrest journalists covering the ongoing “Yellow Vest” protests. The French government is desperate to blank out the protest against the American puppet government in Paris.

Even the San Francisco police, who tolerate massive homelessness on the streets and the associated crimes have been inspired by Assange’s indictment.  The front door of Journalist Bryan Carmody, who reported on the sudden death of a public defender, who apparently was in the way of successful police frameups, was broken down by police wielding sledgehammers.

Rather than knock on the door, the police break in. This not only costs the occupant large sums of money for repairs, but also serves to intimidate and to create a story that there was resistance that had to be overcome by breaking down the door.  This creates the necessary story for killing the occupants and the dog.

Listening to the fairy tales yesterday by Trump in Normandy about all the freedom Americans created by defeating Hitler, I wondered whose freedom he was talking about.  He was talking about the freedom of the oligarchs to rule without hindrance from the people or the First Amendment.

Not only journalists have lost First Amendment protection, but also citizens in encounters with police.  John Whitehead explains how a citizen’s exercise of constitutional rights is grounds for arrest.  https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/on_the_front_lines/u.s._supreme_court_upholds_arrest_over_contempt_of_cop_charge_limits_right_to_challenge_police_use_of_retaliatory_arrests_to_punish_speech

Communication monopolies such as Youtube, Twitter, and Google continue the censureship that teaches Americans to hold their tongues about an increasing array of subjects.  The same lesson is taught in schools and universities as speech codes gradually erase the First Amendment.  Each generation that is born is born into a country with less free speech.  As time passes, people will forget that once government and police could be held accountable.  Without free speech there is tyranny, and the road to tyranny is the road the United States and its Western vassals are on.