Tag: whistleblowers

The UK’s Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK’s Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.

This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the U.S. and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?

Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I’ve laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the U.S. to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.

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Google Accused of Manipulating UK News Results With ‘Anti-Conservative Bias’: Whistleblower

A Google whistleblower told The Epoch Times that the Internet giant has an “anti-conservative bias” and search results are “reconfigured to what the establishment thinks.”

He added that “we have to use whatever democracy we have left to stop this.”

It follows allegations from a Daily Mail study that articles from mostly left-wing outlets were returned among the most searched terms on Google about UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, prompting the country’s culture secretary to say that it “tells us what many have suspected all along.”

On June 10, the Daily Mail showed that searching for Johnson on Google presented far more results from news sites hostile to him. The Guardian came up 38 times, The Independent was cited 14 times, and BBC News came up 24 times. More conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Telegraph came up four times, the Daily Express three times, and MailOnline twice.

The response was noted by UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorres, who is setting up the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) that will oversee a new regulatory regime, and who is currently looking at various platforms to understand how algorithms can impact users’ online experiences.

“I have raised the issue of bias and algorithms distorting democratic content and opinion with Google,” Dorres told the Daily Mail. “They have promised to revert to me with evidence that this is not the case which I have yet to receive.”

“This evidence published by the Mail is fairly conclusive and tells us what many have suspected all along. We are looking at how we can address unfair bias and distortion in the forthcoming Digital Competition Bill,” she told the publication.

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Google Whistleblower: Search Engine ‘Rewrote Algorithms to Go After Trump’

Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, co-author with Kent Heckenlively of the new book Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship, explained how Google “re-wrote their news algorithms to specifically go after Trump” in an interview with the Epoch Times.

Vorhies passed hundreds of internal documents to Project Veritas in 2019, including items from the company’s YouTube search blacklist showing direct interference in democratic votes.

In his interview with the Epoch Times, Vorhies displayed internal files showing how Google ranks news stories. “This is called realtime, hive-mind scoring,” said Vorhies.  “They literally built it, they re-wrote it according to the fight that Trump was having with [James] Comey.”

Asked by Epoch Times interviewer Joshua Phillipp whether this was just a way for Google to surface top news stories, Vorhies pointed out that the quality of search results has declined, with users looking to competing search engines.

“It’s not for increasing market share in the United States… their competitors are having exponential growth.”

“The way that they allowed the mainstream media to structure their stories so they could remain at the top of their search index, their news index.”

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Judge suggests CIA may have illegally recorded Assange conversations, challenging extradition demands

Spanish media is reporting that a court order issued by Spanish High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz indicates that content of communications between Julian Assange and his lawyers may have been illegally recorded during the time he spent at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The order that the newspaper El Pais has seen names Spain’s Under Cover (UC) Global security company as handing over the information to CIA agents. That would have revealed the defense strategy of Assange, a whistleblower and journalist whom the US wants extradited from the UK on espionage charges, a request that has been granted and will be decided on within the next two months by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel.

If put on trial and found guilty in the US, Assange could be sentenced to 175 years in prison for revealing damning US military operations during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and publishing it on the WikiLeaks website.

The Spanish court order is procedural in nature, sent by Jusge Pedraz to the UK as an explanation as to why the country’s authorities should allow him to take testimonies from Assange’s doctors and UK lawyers – one of whom is well known solicitor and human rights activist Gareth Peirce – who were the subject of spying at the embassy.

Legal sources have told El Pais that the extradition request could fall through for violating the right of defense if there is proof that US intelligence agencies managed to learn about Assange’s defense by illegally spying on his legal representatives and doctors. Spain gaining access to these individuals for the sake of obtaining witness testimonies would leave the British justice system “in an embarrassing situation,” some believe.

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THE FBI TRIED TO AMBUSH MY SOURCE. NOW I’M TELLING THE WHOLE STORY.

FBI AGENT GRAYDEN RIDD had a confidential message for his informant. An FBI team had been given the green light by the Justice Department to ambush and derail a planned meeting between a reporter and a source, and the informant’s job was to let the FBI know when and where the meeting would take place.

The reporter whose meeting they planned to target was me.

It was January 2014, and I was an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times focusing on national security. The FBI wanted to stop me from obtaining documents that I’d been told would reveal the details of massive spying operations by the National Security Agency. The FBI was convinced that I was in contact with someone they had secretly nicknamed the “second Snowden,” who was about to give me an archive that they feared could go far beyond what former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had leaked about the agency’s spying operations the year before.

The FBI’s plan to grab my source at our scheduled meeting was approved by top officials at the FBI and the Justice Department during the Obama administration, according to audio recordings I obtained of several phone conversations between Ridd and his informant. At the time, Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general and James Comey was FBI director.

“Right now, they are on board,” Ridd said in one phone conversation to plan the ambush operation, referring to top Justice Department and FBI officials. “I have to periodically go up to the throne room and recommit them. … We actually have a lot of buy-in and a lot of support, but I do need to feed the beast.”

The FBI declined to comment and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. Holder did not answer a request for comment left with his office; Comey did not respond to a request for comment conveyed through his lawyer. Ridd did not respond to a request for comment placed with a relative or to a knock at the door of his home in Washington, D.C.

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Who Really Killed Seth Rich?

Who is Seth Rich, and why was he murdered?  Many media outlets ignored this unsolved murder in D.C. in July 2016.  Those who wrote about this suspicious death were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.  Jack Cashill wrote the best summary of Rich’s murder:

Unknown assailants gun down the young DNC data analyst at 4 A.M. on a Washington, D.C., street and take nothing.  Two weeks later, international man of mystery Julian Assange strongly suggests on Dutch T.V. that Rich was his source for the purloined DNC emails then roiling the Democratic Party.

Many watched the Kabuki Theater of the Deep State unfold over many years with a very jaundiced eye.

[But what if this was a] . . . leak by a disgruntled DNC worker who had physical access to the server and copied the files to a thumb drive or similar.  This thumb drive was then handled [sic] directly to a WikiLeaks operative.  Julian Assange continues to deny he received the DNC files from the Russians.  There is no doubt the Russians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese, and other intel agencies were in Hillary Clinton’s homebrew server.  And yet we were assured with high confidence by our intel agencies Russians [sic] operatives did the DNC hack.

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FBI targeted parents using terrorism tools despite Biden AG’s testimony that they didn’t: whistleblowers

Republican Reps. Jim Jordan (OH) and Mike Johnson (LA) sent a letter to the US Attorney General claiming that whistleblowers have come forward and revealed that the FBI has labeled dozens of investigations into parents who protested schools’ COVID policies with a threat tag, created by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, despite Merrick Garland having previously claimed that it never happened.

In September, The National School Boards Association (NBSA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents who protested school’s COVID policies to domestic terrorists. The Justice Department issued a memo five days later directing the FBI to investigate threats to school boards.

According to the letter written by Jordan and Johnson on Wednesday, an internal email from the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions instructed agents to label all investigations and assessments of threats directed specifically at education officials with the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS.”

Jordan and Johnson wrote that the whistleblower claimed that the FBI opened investigations with the EDUOFFICIALS label in “every region of the country,” on “all types of educational settings.”

The congressmen cited multiple examples where someone reported a parent, or an elected official, using the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and compared the center to a “snitch-line” for tips about parents at school board meetings.

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Military doctors can’t trust DOD medical database after COVID vax injuries scrubbed: whistleblower

Agroup of military doctors alarmed by reported spikes in service members’ miscarriages, myocarditis, cancer and other serious issues in the first year of COVID-19 vaccine availability no longer trust the military’s medical database, one of them told Just the News.

Lt. Col. Peter Chambers said he was now giving potential vaccine-injury cases, from his own practice and that of colleagues, directly to Sen. Ron Johnson for the Wisconsin Republican’s ongoing pressure on the Department of Defense (DOD) to end COVID vaccine mandates.

Their last rendezvous was a few weeks ago in Dallas, where Chambers is based, the retiring Green Beret surgeon and Purple Heart recipient said in a phone interview this week. All service members have signed a release for their records, which include case numbers but not names, to be shared, Chambers said.

Johnson’s office confirmed the meeting, telling Just the News the senator “has acknowledged and given those with vaccine injuries a platform to share their stories,” including doctors. “His goal is to get them the treatment they need.”

Among the senator’s recent actions related to vaccine mandates, Johnson has urged three Veterans Affairs Medical Centers in Wisconsin to end their “pointless and destructive” mandates on employees who sought his intervention. 

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Reputed federal informant, whistleblower found dead in L.A. after he’s reported missing

A reputed federal informant and whistleblower who went missing after he was reported to have turned over a trove of secret files about Deutsche Bank was found dead at a Los Angeles school this week, a police official said Wednesday.

The body of Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was found Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School shortly before 7 a.m., Sgt. Rudy Perez of the Los Angeles School Police Department said in an email.

Records of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner do not list a cause of death. Los Angeles Police Capt. Kenneth Cabrera told the Los Angeles Times that authorities do not suspect foul play.

Broeksmit was last seen driving a red Mini Cooper on the afternoon of April 6, 2021, on Riverside Drive and was later reported missing by relatives, Los Angeles police said.

His vehicle was found, the department said, but Broeksmit remained missing.

Perez said Wednesday that he appeared to be homeless.

According to a 2019 profile in The New York Times, Broeksmit was a musician and the son of a Deutsche Bank executive who died by suicide in 2014.

After his father’s death, Broeksmit gained access to his father’s email account and found hundreds of files related to the bank, including board meeting minutes, financial plans, spreadsheets and password-protected presentations, the newspaper reported.

Federal and state authorities were scrutinizing allegations of criminal misconduct and the bank’s long relationship with former President Donald Trump, the newspaper reported.

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