Tag: corporations

Clearview Facial Recognition: A Perpetual Police Lineup

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That admitted that the company scraped 30 billion photos from Facebook and other social media platforms and used them in its massive facial recognition database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Critics call the company’s database a “perpetual police lineup.” 

This is an example of the growing cooperation between private companies and government agencies in the ever-growing U.S. surveillance state.

The photos were collected from social media platforms without users’ permission or knowledge.

Clearview AI markets its facial recognition database as a tool allowing law enforcement to rapidly generate leads “to help identify suspects, witnesses and victims to close cases faster and keep communities safe.” According to Ton-That, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have accessed the company’s database over 1 million times since 2017.

According to a CNN report last year, more than 3,100 U.S. agencies use Clearview AI, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

In a statement, Ton-That said, “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.”

While photo scraping might be legal, Facebook sent Clearview AI a cease and desist order in 2020 for violation of the platform’s terms of service. In an email to Insider, a Meta spokesperson said, “Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy, which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services.”

Fight for the Future director of campaigns Caitlin Seeley George called Clearview “a total affront to peoples’ rights, full stop,” and said, “Police should not be able to use this tool.”

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Annals of the Covert World: the Secret Life of Shampoo

Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.

In early September, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based conglomerate, fessed up to hiring Phoenix operatives to infiltrate its chief rival Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch cosmetics giants. It was all about the secrets of shampoo, specifically the top-selling Salon Selectives and Finesse. It seems both of those Unilever brands had taken a big bite out of the market share once dominated by a shelf of P&G products, including Wash & Go, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and Vidal Sassoon. Also at stake was the planned sale of Clairol, which was on the auction block with both companies in an intense bidding struggle. One former P&G executive said that the companies were engaged in a decades-long dirty war, which had become “a death struggle to incrementally gain share”.

The operation was launched in June of 2000, when P&G contracted with the Phoenix Consulting Group of Huntsville, Alabama, a corporate espionage firm set up by Phoenix veteran John Nolan and fellow CIA officers. P&G also set up a secret wing inside its own security department. The operations were run out of a secret office known as The Ranch, and featured safe houses, off-shore bank accounts, dumpster diving and informants.

Nolan and his operatives were apparently able to secure more than 80 internal Unilever documents that detailed the company’s shampoo marketing strategy for the next two years. The documents were returned to the company after word of the operation leaked out to a reporter at Fortune magazine. P&G apologized for the operation, saying it had “violated our strict business guidelines regarding our business policies.” The company also fired two executives in the firm’s security sector.

But few take these actions as anything more than the defensive maneuvers of a company caught doing something shady and in full damage control mode. Indeed, P&G is well-known for its paranoia and obsessive concerns about corporate secrecy. Its security officers are known inside the company as “Proctoids”. In the past, P&G has shadowed employees on their business trips to see if they chatted to fellow travelers (and Unilever agents?) about company business, snooped in on company phone lines and tracked computer traffic. A few years ago P&G executives became enraged by a series of critical articles about the company by Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy and retaliated by hitting her with grand jury subpoenas and putting her under 24-hour surveillance.

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Grants Reveal Federal Government’s Horrific Plans To Censor All Americans’ Speech

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.

While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

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YouTube CEO: Our monetization policies are oriented towards making advertisers feel “safe,” “comfortable”

New YouTube CEO Neal Mohan discussed how advertisers are the focus of its monetization policies during an interview with tech and travel creator iJustine and said the intention of monetization policy changes is to make advertisers feel “safe” and “more comfortable.”

Mohan discussed “putting yourself in the shoes of the advertisers” and said, “you have to make it so that it feels to the advertiser not just safe but relatively clear in terms of where their advertising is going to run.”

He continued: “They don’t want to inadvertently damage their brand in any particular way and so our policies are really oriented towards that when I say…one of the best ways to increase creator monetization is to make advertisers more comfortable with the content and that is the goal of our policy changes.”

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Corporatism Will Kill Us All

One of the chief characteristics of an anti democratic corporatist society is the way parliament and people become the servant of business. Large construction, transport, pharmaceutical or military projects are driven not by Government implementing a democratically expressed need but often by corporations creating “needs” – and the plans, systems and budgets to implement them.

Nowhere is that more blatant than in pharmaceutical corporations and their vaccines where deadly viruses are created with the excuse that “if we don’t create them nature or an enemy will and we need to develop a vaccine.”

The vaccines for COVID 19 have proven obscenely profitable for the vaccine producers who have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for themselves, despite tens of thousands of deaths following vaccination and a cover up of deaths and abortions in vaccine trials (not disclosed until long after millions were vaccinated). See this.

The 1918-1920 flu pandemic killed millions. It was over within two years and no vaccine was developed. Now scientists in the USA and Canada have created by “reverse engineering” an even more deadly version of that flu “in order to create a vaccine for it”: see this.

But we know that COVID emanated from a laboratory in Wuhan China which was doing dangerous “gain of function” work in collaboration with America scientists – who had been forbidden by law to carry out that research in the USA. There is no reason why this new recreation of the 1918 flu should not bring the same disaster.

These dangerous projects are totally out of the control of democratic representatives and are classic corporatist collaborations between ignorant governments who have access to the public’s pocket and corporations whose main incentive is profit seeking.

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Biden admin calls for digital ID investment, public-private data sharing collaboration

The White House has presented its National Security Strategy that, among other points, calls for investing in digital IDs.

The Biden administration, however, is short on detail regarding this issue and privacy implications, while mentioning the term biometrics only once.

“Strategic Objective 4.5” is a 4-paragraph section in the 35-page document that speaks about supporting development of a digital identity “ecosystem.”

We obtained a copy of the document for you here.

The administration calls for improved digital identity infrastructure that would produce “a more innovative, equitable, safe and efficient digital economy.”

Like all other justifications for the push to adopt digital IDs, this one mentions conveniences and “secure” access to government services and benefits, “trusted” communication, as well as social networks, and improved payment systems.

To get there from here, the document calls for the digital ecosystem in question to undergo “fundamental changes,” and wants to bring in the private sector – both through “close cooperation” and public-private undertakings.

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Here’s The Lawmaker Who Accepts More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accepted more donations in the last election cycle from BlackRock and individuals affiliated with the firm than any other member of Congress.

The connection between the lawmaker and the asset management company was noted by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-profit government oversight and research organization, after Schumer rebuked efforts to scrap a Labor Department rule that would allow retirement fiduciaries to allocate funds in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG. Both the House and Senate passed a resolution opposed to the rule, which President Joe Biden is expected to veto.

BlackRock is a leading proponent of the ESG movement, which critics say mingles political and social causes such as decreasing carbon emissions and achieving racial diversity in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Schumer nevertheless accepted $103,950 from individuals associated with BlackRock and $10,000 from a political action committee controlled by the company, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

“ESG opponents are trying to turn it into a dirty acronym, deploying attacks they’ve used for elements of a so-called woke agenda,” Schumer said on social media this week as the resolution moved through Congress. “They call ESG wokeness. They call it a cult. They call it an incursion into free markets. I say ESG is just common sense.”

Candidates from both parties benefit from BlackRock money, with Republicans getting $639,000 and Democrats getting $453,000 in the most recent midterm election cycle. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) were the second and third-largest individual recipients of funds from BlackRock and individuals associated with BlackRock.

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6 Ways The Censorship Complex Silences Speech It Doesn’t Want You To Say Or Hear

Since Trump entered the political arena and proved the efficacy of sidestepping the legacy media and speaking directly to the people, a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech have joined forces to erect a Censorship Complex. Collaboration, funding, and groupthink connect these players, and an analysis of their functioning reveals six ways they operate to censor speech in America.

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Distract, Divide and Conquer: The Painful Truth About the State of Our Union

Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness.

These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot afford to ignore them much longer.

Foreign interests are buying up our farmland and holding our national debt. As of 2021, foreign persons and entities owned 40.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land, 47% of which was forestland, 29% in cropland, and 22% in pastureland. Foreign land holdings have increased by an average of 2.2 million acres per year since 2015. Foreign countries also own $7.4 trillion worth of U.S. national debt, with Japan and China ranked as our two largest foreign holders of our debt.

Corporate and governmental censorship have created digital dictators. While the “Twitter files” revealed the lengths to which the FBI has gone to monitor and censor social media content, the government has been colluding with the tech sector for some time now in order to silence its critics and target “dangerous” speech in the name of fighting so-called disinformation. The threat of being labelled “disinformation” is being used to undermine anyone who asks questions, challenges the status quo, and engages in critical thinking.

Middle- and lower-income Americans are barely keeping up. Rising costs of housing, food, gas and other necessities are presenting nearly insurmountable hurdles towards financial independence for the majority of households who are scrambling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, mounting layoffs in the tens of thousands are adding to the fiscal pain.

The government is attempting to weaponize mental health care. Increasingly, in communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, even if they pose no danger to others. While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with the government’s ongoing efforts to predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), the specter of mental health round-ups begins to sound less far-fetched.

The military’s global occupation is spreading our resources thin and endangering us at home. America’s war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin. In 2022 alone, the U.S. approved more than $50 billion in aid for Ukraine, half of which went towards military spending, with more on the way. The U.S. also maintains some 750 military bases in 80 countries around the world.

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Popular Small Health Food Companies We Trusted That Sold Out

The more we know about who owns and controls our food, the more we can support trustworthy companies. 

“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” This famous quote by Henry Kissinger is ringing more and more true by the week. 

When our children were young (1991-2005), these wonderful (often family-owned) health food companies were often my go-to because I trusted them and the ingredients. So their sell-outs came as quite a surprise. Healthy, environmentally-aware brands have seen huge sales growth in recent years, and big names like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and General Mills all want a piece of the action.

These alternatives cost more but people were willing to pay, in large part because they saw these brands as being smaller, healthier, more responsible choices.

A lot of these “niche” companies are now owned by the very corporations many shoppers are trying to avoid.

As experts like Philip Howard at Michigan State University have stated, big companies tend to tinker with formulas to make them easier to mass-produce and cheaper.

Here are some natural and organic brands that have gone “mega-corporate” in recent years.

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