Tag: police state

The Number Of Jailed Journalists Reaches Record High

In 2022, more journalists than ever before were imprisoned for doing their job.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, some 363 journalists were imprisoned in 30 different countries last year, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

By 2021, the number of detainees had already exceeded 300 – roughly doubling since 2015. An alarming trend that, according to the experts, is a sign of the deterioration of press freedom worldwide.

In 2022, the largest number of journalists were held in an Iranian prison (62 people), in China (43), and Myanmar, where 42 people were locked away at the end of the year.

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Bringing the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for ‘Disinformation’

The U.S. government took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans. America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their war against American liberty.

That’s the argument made by Jacob Siegel in a 13,000-word Tablet magazine article titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which seeks to explain “a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people” by elitists “who believe themselves to be infallible.”

Specifically, Siegel writes, these “infallible” elitists believe they are saving the world from “disinformation,” which is whatever they view as untruths about Russia, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Covid, climate change, election fraud, Brexit, etc. You name a flavor of disinfo, and they want to save us from it. And they’re operating in the State Department and other federal agencies, in numerous foundations and NGOs, and at a hundred academic “centers” that have sprung up like ‘shrooms since 2016.

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Santa Monica cops who ignored warnings that staffer Eric Uller allegedly molested boys should be prosecuted: lawyer

A California attorney who represented more than 80 victims allegedly molested and raped by a Santa Monica, Calif., police employee said cops and other officials who ignored warnings also should face criminal charges.

Attorney Brian Claypool said decades of abuse could’ve been prevented if officers listened to his clients’ pleas to fire the late Eric Uller, who worked for the nonprofit after-school Police Activities League program since the late 1980s.

The City of Santa Monica this week agreed to a whopping $122.5 million settlement involving 124 victims but court records show Uller molested more than 200 victims, who were minors at the time.

“The fact that this was a nonprofit connected to police makes it even worse,” Claypool told The Post. “Police are hired to protect and serve, and the fact that they had this guy around children … it never should’ve happened.

“They knew this guy had a propensity for molesting kids but did nothing. They were protecting a dangerous sexual predator.”

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How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex

I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My résumé also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.

[Read the accompanying #TwitterFile – The Informational Cartel]

In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital-security workshops for journalists and human-rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

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Leftist Minnesota Just Gave State Power To Take Kids Away If Parents Don’t Approve Gender Surgery

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Thursday signed into law a bill making the state a “sanctuary” for children, including those from out of state, seeking gender-altering surgery without the consent of their parents.

The new law gives state courts temporary emergency jurisdiction over any child in Minnesota who has been abandoned, is in need of protection from abuse, or has “been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care.” The law defines such care as “medically necessary health care or mental health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient” and specifically cites puberty blockers and chemical and surgical procedures “to align the patient’s appearance or physical body with the patient’s gender identity.”

“We just signed the Conversion Therapy Ban, Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, and Trans Refuge Bill into law,” said Democrat Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan. “In Minnesota, we’re building a state where everyone is safe to be who they are, love who they love, and live without fear of violence and discrimination.”

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Meet a Forgotten CIA Critic Who Presciently Characterized the Agency as a Cancer in 1970 Book

In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer.

Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals.

Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”[1]

These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.

Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.”

This money had a deeply corrupting effect, tarnishing intellectual and scientific integrity, debasing political life and causing almost all societal institutions to be up for sale.

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US Officials Reject Compensation for People Diagnosed With COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries

U.S. authorities rejected multiple people who sought compensation for COVID-19 vaccine injuries, despite diagnoses from doctors, documents show.

Letters from U.S. officials reviewed by The Epoch Times show officials contradicting doctors who treated patients as they turned down requests for payment.

Cody Flint, an agricultural pilot, was diagnosed by four doctors with a severe adverse reaction to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Shortly after being vaccinated, Flint experienced intense head pressure, which led to problems such as perilymphatic fistula, the doctors said.

Flint sent a slew of medical files, including evidence of the diagnoses, to the U.S. Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which compensates people who prove they were injured by a COVID-19 shot.

But administrators for the program rejected Flint’s application in a denial letter, saying they “did not find the requisite evidence that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination caused” the conditions from which he suffers.

Flint, in his 30s, felt his first symptoms within an hour of vaccination. An onslaught of severe symptoms followed while he was flying two days later.

“One second I went from having burning in the back of my neck and tunnel vision to the very next second I was slumped over in my airplane. The best way I know to describe it, it was like a bomb went off inside my head,” Flint said.

CICP administrators told him that “compelling, reliable and valid medical and scientific evidence does not support a causal association between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, perilymphatic fistulas, increased intracranial pressure, Eustachian tube dysfunction, hearing loss, or loss of eyesight.”

They also tried to pin the problems on barotrauma. Colloquially known as airplane ear, barotrauma happens when air pressure suddenly changes, and is common as planes climb higher in the sky. Barotrauma causes the fistulas and symptoms of the fistulas “began while flying,” administrators wrote.

Flint and his doctors asserted in appeal letters that the barotrauma theory doesn’t hold up because Flint flies low as he dusts crops. Flint’s condition is “not from barotrauma,” Flint’s doctors told the CICP. “As an agricultural pilot, he does not fly more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground which is not of a magnitude to where he is at risk for barotrauma.”

“Elevated intracranial pressure has been recognized as a complication of COVID vaccination, and given the sequence of events, more probable than not, it is the cause of Mr. Flint’s elevated intracranial pressure, which had been documented on lumbar puncture,” they added. “The elevated intracranial pressure led to his perilymphatic fistula. Elevated intracranial pressure is a cause for perilymphatic fistula and more probable.”

The CICP determination was reviewed by a panel that sided with administrators. The panel found that the COVID-19 vaccine “did not cause Mr. Flint to develop bilateral perlympathic fistulas and related symptoms,” Suma Nair, an administrator, told Flint in a final denial letter. “There is no compelling causal connection between the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine and the symptomology Mr. Flint experienced; the more likely cause of Mr. Flint’s symptoms is trauma from flying a plane, which would have developed over time.”

Administrators cited no studies or other evidence in their letters.

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Over 10,000 FBI Agents Can Access Data From Secretive Surveillance Program: Inspectors General

More than 10,000 federal employees could have access to data revealed by a secretive government surveillance program that has come under scrutiny because of alleged abuses, lawmakers were told by U.S. inspectors general.

At an April 27 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, lawmakers heard from a panel of three witnesses associated with the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG) responsible for oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The legislation gives intelligence agencies broad powers to conduct surveillance on foreigners suspected of spying for a foreign power or belonging to a terrorist group.

However, bipartisan concerns have been raised because the program also has the ability to collect information about U.S. citizens.

During the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) queried panelists about how many FBI agents could have access to FISA-acquired data.

A court-ordered report released in May 2022 revealed that the FBI had made more than 3.3 million queries of Americans under FISA authority. This, in turn, prompted a crisis of confidence in the FBI’s respect for civil liberties among members of both parties.

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