Source: Tulsi Gabbard
Tulsi Gabbard delivers a brilliant speech regarding the Weaponization of the Federal Government during a House Subcommittee meeting.
This year the Internet Archive turns 25. It’s best known for its pioneering role in archiving the internet through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see how websites looked in the past.
Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online. School, work, communication with friends and family, as well as news and images, are accessed through a variety of websites. Information that once was printed, physically mailed, or kept in photo albums and notebooks may now be available only online. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web.
You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing. As librarians and archivists, we strengthen collective memory by preserving materials that document the cultural heritage of society, including on the web. You can help us save the internet, too, as citizen archivists.
People and organizations remove content from the web for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s a result of changing internet culture, such as the recent shutdown of Yahoo Answers.
It can also be a result of following best practices for website design. When a website is updated, for example, the previous version is overwritten – unless it was archived.
Web archiving is the process of collecting, preserving, and providing continued access to information on the internet. Often this work is done by librarians and archivists, with assistance from automated technology like web crawlers.
Web crawlers are programs that index web pages to make them available through search engines, or for long-term preservation. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, uses thousands of computer servers to save multiple digital copies of these pages, requiring over 70 petabytes of data. It is funded through donations, grants, and payments for its digitization services. Over 750 million web pages are captured per day in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
In 2018, President Donald Trump wrongly claimed via Twitter that Google had promoted on its homepage President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, but not his own. Archived versions of the Google homepage proved that Google had, in fact, highlighted Trump’s State of the Union address in the same manner. Multiple news outlets use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as the source for fact-checking these types of claims since screenshots alone can be easily altered.
A 2019 report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism examined the digital archiving practices and policies of newspapers, magazines, and other news producers. The interviews revealed that many news media staff either do not have the resources to devote to archiving their work or misunderstand digital archiving by equating it to having a backup version.
When a news story disappeared from the Gawker website a year after the publication shut down, the Freedom of the Press Foundation became concerned with what might happen when wealthy individuals purchase websites with the intent to delete or censor the archives. It partnered with the Internet Archive to launch a web archive collection focused on preserving the web archives of vulnerable news outlets – and to dissuade billionaires from purchasing such material to censor.
Archiving websites that document social justice issues, such as Black Lives Matter, helps explain these movements to people of the present and the future.
Archiving government websites promotes transparency and accountability. Especially during times of transition, government websites are vulnerable to deletion with changing political parties.
In 2017 the Library of Congress announced it would no longer archive every single tweet, because of Twitter’s growth as a communication tool. Twitter supplies the Library of Congress with the texts of tweets, not shared images or videos. Instead of comprehensive collecting, the Library of Congress now archives only tweets of significant national importance.
Archived websites that document the culture and history of the internet, like the Geocities Gallery, not only are fun to look at but illustrate the ways early websites were created and used by individuals.
Archiving the internet is a monumental task, one that librarians and archivists cannot do alone. Anyone can be a citizen archivist and preserve history through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The “Save Page Now” feature allows anyone to freely archive a single, public website page. Bear in mind, some websites prevent web crawling and archiving through special coding or by requiring a login to the site. This may be due to sensitive content or the personal preference of the web developer.
Local cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, are also actively archiving the internet. Over 800 institutions use Archive-It, a tool from the Internet Archive, to create archived web collections. At the University of Dayton, we curate collections related to our Catholic and Marianist heritage, from Catholic blogs to stories of the Virgin Mary in the news.
Through its Spontaneous Event collections, Archive-It partners with organizations and individuals to create collections of “web content related to a specific event, capturing at-risk content during times of crisis.”
Similarly, it created the Community Webs program, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to help public libraries create collections of archived web content relevant to local communities.
The websites of today are the historical evidence of tomorrow, but only if they are archived. If they are lost, we will lose crucial information about corporate and government decisions, modern communication methods such as social media, and social movements with significant online presences, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.
Together with librarians and archivists, you can help ensure the survival of this evidence and save internet history.
Kayla Harris, Librarian/Archivist at the Marian Library, Associate Professor, University of Dayton; Christina Beis, Director of Collections Strategies & Services, Associate Professor, University Libraries, University of Dayton, and Stephanie Shreffler, Collections Librarian/Archivist and Associate Professor, University Libraries, University of Dayton
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Video Source: Inspired
A global internet shutdown might be imminent. We have seen preparations and signs for this and it might be time to get ready and prepare – also, a great & inspiring alternative is in the works!
You try to use your credit card, but it doesn’t work. In fact, no one’s credit card works. You try to go to some news sites to find out why, but you can’t access any of those, either. Neither can anyone else. Panic-buying ensues. People empty ATMs of cash.
This kind of catastrophic pan-internet meltdown is more likely than most people realize.
I direct the Internet Atlas Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Our goal is to shine a light on long-term risks to the internet. We produce indicators of weak points and bottlenecks that threaten the internet’s stability.
For example, where are points of fragility in the global connectivity of cables? Physical cables under the sea deliver 95% of the internet’s voice and data traffic. But some countries, like Tonga, connect to only one other country, making them vulnerable to cable-clipping attacks.
Another example is content delivery networks, which websites use to make their content readily available to large numbers of internet users. An outage at the content delivery network Fastly on June 8, 2021, briefly severed access to the websites of Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Reddit, Spotify, The New York Times, and the U.K. government.
We take measurements at various layers of the internet’s technological stack, from cables to content delivery networks. With those measurements, we identify weak points in the global internet. And from those weak points, we build theories that help us understand what parts of the internet are at risk of disruption, whom those disruptions will affect, and how severely, and predict what would make the internet more resilient.
Currently, the internet is facing twin dangers. On one side, there’s the threat of total consolidation. Power over the internet has been increasingly concentrated primarily in the hands of a few, U.S.-based organizations. On the other side, there’s fragmentation. Attempts to challenge the status quo, particularly by Russia and China, threaten to destabilize the internet globally.
While there’s no single best path for the internet, our indicators can help policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, activists, and others understand if their interventions are having their intended effect. For whom is the internet becoming more reliable, and for whom is it becoming more unstable? These are the critical questions. About 3.4 billion people are just now getting online in countries including Fiji, Tonga, and Vanuatu. What kind of internet will they inherit?
Since at least 2015, the core services that power the internet have become increasingly centralized in the hands of U.S. corporations. We estimate that U.S. corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies could block a cumulative 96% of content on the global internet in some capacity.
The U.S. Department of Justice has long used court orders aimed at tech providers to block global access to content that’s illegal in the U.S., such as copyright infringements. But lately, the U.S. federal government has been leveraging its jurisdiction more aggressively. In June, the DOJ used a court order to briefly seize an Iranian news site because the department said it was spreading disinformation.
Due to interlocking dependencies on the web, such as content delivery networks, one misstep in applying this technique could take down a key piece of the internet infrastructure, making a widespread outage more likely.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based technology companies also risk wreaking havoc. Consider Australia’s recent spat with Facebook overpaying news outlets for their content. At one point, Facebook blocked all news on its platform in Australia. One consequence was that many people in Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu temporarily lost a key news source because they rely on prepaid cellphone plans that feature discounted access to Facebook. As these skirmishes increase in frequency, countries worldwide are likely to suffer disruptions to their internet access.
Naturally, not everyone is happy with this U.S.-led internet. Russia throttles Twitter traffic. China blocks access to Google.
These domestic maneuvers certainly threaten localized meltdowns. India now regularly shuts down the internet regionally during civil unrest. But, in aggregate, they present a more global threat: internet fragmentation. A fragmented internet threatens speech, trade, and global cooperation in science.
It also increases the risk of cyberattacks on core internet infrastructure. In a global internet, attacks on infrastructure hurt everyone, but walled-off national internets would change that calculus. For example, Russia has the capacity to disconnect itself from the rest of the world’s internet while maintaining service domestically. With that capacity, it could attack core global internet infrastructure with less risk of upsetting its domestic population. A sophisticated attack against a U.S. company could trigger a large-scale internet outage.
For much of its history, the internet has been imperfectly, but largely, open. Content could be accessed anywhere, across borders. Perhaps this openness is because, rather than in spite, of the U.S.‘s dominance over the internet.
Whether or not that theory holds, the U.S.’s dominance over the internet is unlikely to persist. The status quo faces challenges from the U.S.’s adversaries, its historical allies, and its own domestic tech companies. Absent action, the world will be left with some mixture of unchecked U.S. power and ad-hoc, decentralized skirmishes.
In this environment, building a stable and transnational internet for future generations is a challenge. It requires delicacy and precision. That’s where work like ours comes into play. To make the internet more stable globally, people need measurements to understand its chokepoints and vulnerabilities. Just as central banks watch measures of inflation and employment when they decide how to set rates, internet governance, too, should rely on indicators, however imperfect.
[Understand new developments in science, health, and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]
Nick Merrill, Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
By | The Conversation
Search engines are one of society’s primary gateways to information and people, but they are also conduits for misinformation. Similar to problematic social media algorithms, search engines learn to serve you what you and others have clicked on before. Because people are drawn to the sensational, this dance between algorithms and human nature can foster the spread of misinformation.
Search engine companies, like most online services, make money not only by selling ads but also by tracking users and selling their data through real-time bidding on it. People are often led to misinformation by their desire for sensational and entertaining news as well as information that is either controversial or confirms their views. One study found that more popular YouTube videos about diabetes are less likely to have medically valid information than less popular videos on the subject, for instance.
Ad-driven search engines, like social media platforms, are designed to reward clicking on enticing links because it helps the search companies boost their business metrics. As a researcher who studies the search and recommendation systems, I and my colleagues show that this dangerous combination of the corporate profit motive and individual susceptibility makes the problem difficult to fix.
When you click on a search result, the search algorithm learns that the link you clicked is relevant for your search query. This is called relevance feedback. This feedback helps the search engine give higher weight to that link for that query in the future. If enough people click on that link enough times, thus giving strong relevance feedback, that website starts coming up higher in search results for that and related queries.
People are more likely to click on links shown up higher on the search results list. This creates a positive feedback loop – the higher a website shows up, the more the clicks, and that in turn makes that website move higher or keep it higher. Search engine optimization techniques use this knowledge to increase the visibility of websites.
There are two aspects to this misinformation problem: how a search algorithm is evaluated and how humans react to headlines, titles, and snippets. Search engines, like most online services, are judged using an array of metrics, one of which is user engagement. It is in the search engine companies’ best interest to give you things that you want to read, watch or simply click. Therefore, as a search engine or any recommendation system creates a list of items to present, it calculates the likelihood that you’ll click on the items.
Traditionally, this was meant to bring out the information that would be most relevant. However, the notion of relevance has gotten fuzzy because people have been using search to find entertaining search results as well as truly relevant information.
Imagine you are looking for a piano tuner. If someone shows you a video of a cat playing the piano, would you click on it? Many would, even if that has nothing to do with piano tuning. The search service feels validated with positive relevance feedback and learns that it is OK to show a cat playing the piano when people search for piano tuners.
In fact, it is even better than showing the relevant results in many cases. People like watching funny cat videos and the search system gets more clicks and user engagement.
This might seem harmless. So what if people get distracted from time to time and click on results that aren’t relevant to the search query? The problem is that people are drawn to exciting images and sensational headlines. They tend to click on conspiracy theories and sensationalized news, not just cats playing piano, and do so more than clicking on real news or relevant information.
In 2018, searches for “new deadly spider” spiked on Google following a Facebook post that claimed a new deadly spider killed several people in multiple states. My colleagues and I analyzed the top 100 results from Google search for “new deadly spider” during the first week of this trending query.
The first two pages of Google search results for ‘new deadly spider’ in August 2018 (shaded area) were related to the original fake news post about that subject, not debunking or otherwise factual information. Chirag Shah, CC BY-ND
It turned out this story was fake, but people searching for it were largely exposed to misinformation related to the original fake post. As people continued clicking and sharing that misinformation, Google continued serving those pages at the top of the search results.
This pattern of thrilling and unverified stories emerging and people clicking on them continues, with people apparently either being unconcerned with the truth or believing that if a trusted service such as Google Search is showing these stories to them then the stories must be true. More recently, a disproven report claiming China let the coronavirus leak from a lab gained traction on search engines because of this vicious cycle.
To test how well people discriminate between accurate information and misinformation, we designed a simple game called “Google Or Not.” This online game shows two sets of results for the same query. The objective is simple – pick the set that is reliable, trustworthy, or most relevant.
In tests, about half the time people can’t tell the difference between Google search results containing misinformation and those with only trustworthy results. Chirag Shah, CC BY-ND
One of these two sets has one or two results that are either verified and labeled as misinformation or a debunked story. We made the game available publicly and advertised through various social media channels. Overall, we collected 2,100 responses from over 30 countries.
When we analyzed the results, we found that about half the time people mistakenly picked as trustworthy the set with one or two misinformation results. Our experiments with hundreds of other users over many iterations have resulted in similar findings. In other words, about half the time people are picking results that contain conspiracy theories and fake news. As more people pick these inaccurate and misleading results, the search engines learn that that’s what people want.
Questions of Big Tech regulation and self-regulation aside, it’s important for people to understand how these systems work and how they make money. Otherwise, market economies and people’s natural inclination to be attracted to eye-catching links will keep the vicious cycle going.
Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Washington
By Whitney Webb | The Defender
Story at-a-glance:
Tech giants with deep ties to the U.S. national security state — Microsoft, Oracle, and the MITRE Corporation — announced that they had partnered with several healthcare companies to create the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to advance the implementation of digital COVID-19 vaccination records.
According to a Reuters report, the VCI “aims to help people get encrypted digital copies of their immunization records stored in a digital wallet of their choice” because the “current system [of vaccination records] does not readily support convenient access and sharing of verifiable vaccination records.”
The initiative, on its website, notes that the VCI is a public-private partnership “committed to empowering individuals with digital vaccination records” so that participants can “protect and improve their health” and “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.”
The initiative is essentially built on a common framework of digital vaccination “wallets” called SMART Health Cards that are meant to “work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries” as part of a new global vaccination-record infrastructure.
The host of the VCI website and one of the initiative’s key backers is the Commons Project Foundation. That foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), runs the Common Trust Network, which has three goals that are analogous to those of VCI.
As listed on the WEF website, the network’s goals are (1) to empower individuals by providing digital access to their health information; (2) to make it easier for individuals to understand and comply with each destination’s requirements; and (3) to help ensure that only verifiable lab results and vaccination records from trusted sources are presented for the purposes of cross-border travel and commerce.
To advance these goals, the Common Trust Network is powered by “a global registry of trusted laboratory and vaccination data sources” as well as “standard formats for lab results and vaccination records and standard tools to make those results and records digitally accessible.”
Another, and related, Commons Project Foundation and WEF partnership are CommonPass. CommonPass, which is also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”
Current members of CommonPass, including JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, are also members of the Common Trust Network. This overlap between the Commons Project Foundation/WEF partnerships and the VCI illustrates that the WEF itself is involved with the VCI, albeit indirectly through their partners at the Commons Project Foundation.
The Commons Project Foundation itself is worth exploring, as its co-founders, Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins, have long-standing ties to the RAND Corporation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the International Rescue Committee, as noted by MintPress News.
The IRC, currently run by Tony Blair protégé David Milliband, is developing a biometric ID and vaccination-record system for refugees in Myanmar in cooperation with the ID2020 Alliance, which is partnered with CommonPass backer, the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, the ID2020 Alliance funds the Commons Project Foundation and is also backed by Microsoft, one of the key companies behind the VCI.
Wearable IDs for your health and your wallet
The overlap between digital vaccination records, promoted via initiatives such as CommonPass and VCI, and the push for a new global digital-identity system is no coincidence. Indeed, the developer of VCI’s SMART Health Cards framework at Microsoft Health, Josh C. Mandel, noted in his overview presentation on that framework that digital identity is integral to the digital vaccination-record effort.
SMART Health Cards, as of now, is expected to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information, though it is possible and likely that more personal information will be required as the initiative advances, given that VCI states that these identifiers are merely a starting point.
While advertised as digital vaccination records, SMART Health Cards are clearly intended to be used for much more. For instance, public information on the framework notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across healthcare,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public health agencies, and communicating with healthcare providers.
Yet, this framework will not be limited to healthcare information, as Mandel has said. In his presentation, he notes the application of SMART Health Cards could soon be used as IDs for commercial activity, such as renting a car. The VCI framework’s use of the term “digital wallet” to refer to its digital vaccination record is also suggestive of future connectivity to economic activity.
Efforts to link digital identity, not just to economic activity but also to health data, have recently escalated, for example with the piloting of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (aka GAVI) — Mastercard — Trust Stamp partnership in Africa.
That program first launched in 2018, links Trust Stamp’s digital-identity platform with the GAVI-Mastercard Wellness Pass, a digital vaccination record, and Mastercard’s click-to-play system run on AI technology called NuData. Mastercard and GAVI are both partnered with the ID2020 Alliance, which includes VCI member Microsoft.
Given the reasonable speculation that such platforms would utilize digital currency, specifically cryptocurrency, for financial activity, it is worth noting that VCI member Microsoft filed a patent in 2019 that would allow “human body activity,” including brain waves and body heat, to mine (i.e., generate) cryptocurrency. This, of course, would link biometrics to financial activity, among other things.
Such a system, as laid out in the Microsoft patent, would likely require the introduction of wearables in order to be implemented. Notably, numerous wearables for contactless identity, digital travel passes, and payment devices have recently been launched.
Examples include DigitalDNA, Proxy, and FlyWallet. FlyWallet is particularly notable as their latest product, Keyble, is a wearable that combines digital identity through fingerprint authentication, which enables both contactless payments and health applications such as vital-sign monitoring and data sharing with insurance companies and healthcare providers.
Sponsored by spooks and Silicon Valley
The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences.
Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the U.S., particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.
Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities.
While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers.
Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.” Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the U.S., such as Ancestry.com.
Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the co-founder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.
Google and the majority of VCI’s backers — Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare — are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition.
Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of healthcare and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combating COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members.
That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the U.S. government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.
Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform.
Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records.
Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. U.S. military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International, have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.
Predictive COVID-19 diagnosis is also an ambition of another company that backs VCI, Salesforce. Salesforce is one of three companies that created COVID 360, which Salesforce senior vice president Bob Vanstraelen describes as a “free full Coronavirus treatment solution for patients and citizens at risk” that is hosted on Salesforce Health Cloud and was by Deloitte’s Israel branch and the Israeli intelligence-linked AI firm Diagnostic Robotics.
COVID 360 uses the Diagnostic Robotics clinical-predictions platform and applies it to COVID-19 so that “government agencies or caretakers” can identify individuals “in proximity to a potential positive coronavirus case” and mandate coronavirus testing and/or treatment regimes, based on a risk profile generated by COVID 360. Diagnostic Robotics and Salesforce are both members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition.
Salesforce founder, chair, and CEO Marc Benioff was previously a vice president at Oracle. Oracle, another VCI backer, was created as a spin-off of a CIA project of the same name, and its top executives have close ties to the outgoing Trump administration and also to Israel’s government. While Benioff’s pre-Salesforce history to a CIA-linked company like Oracle is significant, Benioff’s close ties to the World Economic Forum also deserve greater scrutiny.
Benioff is not only a member of the WEF’s board of trustees, but he is also the inaugural chair of the forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a “revolution” that its architect and WEF founder Klaus Schwab defines as a merging of humans’ physical, digital and biological identities. Benioff is also the owner and co-chair of Time magazine, which recently ran an entire issue focused on promoting the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the WEF-backed Great Reset.
Benioff also serves on the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a collaboration between the Vatican and oligarchs to create a “more inclusive, sustainable and trusted economic system” for the 21st century.
Alongside Benioff on the council are well-known figures such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild (a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons), Mark Carney (UN special envoy for Climate Action and former governor of the Bank of England), and William Lauder (executive chairman of Estée Lauder, nephew of Mega Group member Ronald Lauder) as well as the top executives of MasterCard, Visa, Dupont, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, BP and Bank of America. Also present are the heads of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Benioff and others mentioned in this article are perfect examples of the cross-pollination between groups of oligarchs and their associated foundations and organizations and how these networks are working together to pursue a common agenda.
While the push for combining digital identity with vaccination records and economic activity appears, superficially, to be the effort of various organizations and groups, the same individuals and entities appear time and again, pointing to a coordinated push to not only implement such a system but manufacture consent for such a system among the global population.
The effort to manufacture consent for an all-encompassing digital identification system is notable given that its main selling point thus far has been coercion. We have been told that without such a system we will never be able to return to work or school, never be able to travel, or never be allowed to participate normally in the economy.
While this system is being introduced in this way, it is essential to point out that coercion is a built-in part of this infrastructure and, if implemented, will be used to modify human behavior to great effect, reaching far beyond just the issue of COVID-19 vaccines.
Originally published by Mercola.
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | mercola.com
In recent days and weeks, we’ve seen an unprecedented wave of censorship sweep across the internet. As noted by Coindesk.com,1 that we need a decentralized web is more evident than ever, and now’s the time to advance such plans:
“Just as bitcoin redistributed power from the legacy financial system in favor of peer-to-peer electronic cash, the next-generation internet aims to redistribute power from corporate giants like Google and Facebook to sovereign individuals who own and control their own data.
To achieve this monumental goal, changes must be made to the internet’s underlying architecture. Thankfully, the pace of progress is dramatically accelerating in three foundational components: storage, naming and database …
Obviously 2020 will be remembered for the immense amount of pain and suffering endured by millions around the globe. However, throughout history, moments like these are often accompanied by great periods of innovation and creativity.
It is through this hopeful lens that we see a world where the decentralized web eventually becomes ‘the’ web with fairness, freedom and individual sovereignty at its core. And, as the past year has shown, many brilliant people are laboring tirelessly to make this dream a reality.”
The Coindesk article points out that movement toward decentralized storage and databases has been fast and furious, and includes an extensive list of developments. Even changes to how the Domain Name System (DNS) functions are in the works. Why decentralize the DNS? As noted in the article:2
“Within the current system, the bottom line is you can be erased from the Internet at any moment, for any reason, by anyone with enough power. Decentralized DNS makes it virtually impossible for authorities to shut down access to the web and gives individuals real ownership over their digital identities, communication channels and means of commerce.”
One decentralized DNS service is UnstoppableDomains.com, which uses blockchain technology. I recognized this early last year, which is why we purchased the mercola.crypto domain that we hope to launch later this year.
Additionally, I am currently in the process of connecting with the founder of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike, probably the best encrypted private communications platform out there, to strategize about how to decentralize a social platform like Parler.
Affirming the validity of this approach, one of my favorite crypto analysts that I subscribe to is Anthony Pompliano. In a January 11, 2021, blog post,3 he points out that literally everything for the decentralized web must be rebuilt.
“You can’t simply rely on Amazon’s AWS. You have to leverage Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and self-hosting in combination with each other to drastically improve the resiliency of what you’re building,” he says.
“Private companies can do whatever they want. And they are reminding us of that. But in doing so, they are also reminding millions of people that there can be a better world. A world where no single person or organization gets to dictate what information we receive.
No single person or organization gets to choose who gets amplified and who gets silenced. The power of choice was stripped from the user and is now being monopolized by the platform creators … The beloved tech giants are becoming villains. This will lead to a rise in new challengers.
This is the circle of life in technology. If you can’t influence the status quo, just disrupt it. And I think that is exactly what we need at this point. We can leverage technology to take the power back from these monopolies and allow the user to choose who and what to consume.”
Clearly, many others are in agreement that a decentralized web — one in which monopolies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube cannot rule with impunity — has become an urgent necessity.4 Alternatives cannot be created fast enough.
While tech giants have brushed off accusations of monopolizing services saying that they welcome competition, they have in recent days proven they will accept no such thing.
Case in point: In what appears to be a coordinated attack, Google, Apple and Amazon destroyed Parler, the main competitor to Twitter and Facebook, literally overnight by yanking it from their app stores and web hosting service.5,6,7,8
January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been “dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”9 As reported by St. Louis Discussing the recent social media purge and the destruction of Parler, Glenn Greenwald writes:10
“So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech … The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology.
They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see …
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter.”
Greenwald is one of my absolute favorite journalists. His brilliant and deep insights into the progressive tyrannical destruction that is occurring is an important perspective that will open your eyes to what is happening to our world.
Glenn actually quit the publishing company he founded, The Intercept, because they censored him.11 This is a man of integrity, committed to the highest ethical principles. He started a substack newsletter to help fund his efforts and you can subscribe to it for $5/month.
The justification is given by Google, Apple, and Amazon for their takedown was that Parler had “the potential of spreading violent content” and had refused to censor its users over and above taking down posts that violate its stated terms of service.
However, can anyone with a straight face claim that violent content cannot and has not been disseminated via any other social media platforms or telecommunications services?
All communications services have the ability to carry this kind of information. It’s inevitable, seeing how bad actors will use one service or another to communicate ill intent with others. They’re hardly using carrier pigeons or paper bulletin boards anymore.
As reported by Vision Times,12 Apple told Parler it is “responsible for all the user-generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users.” In response, Matze stated:13
“Apparently they believe Parler is responsible for ALL user generated content on Parler. Therefor [sic] by the same logic, Apple must be responsible for ALL actions taken by their phones.
Every car bomb, every illegal cell phone conversation, every illegal crime committed on an iPhone, Apple must also be responsible for,” adding that “Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves, apply to Parler.”
Indeed, crimes occur on big tech platforms every day. The April 5, 2018, ABC News article14 “Mayhem and Murder: 10 Most Shocking Facebook Live Moments Ever” detailed some of the most stunning ones.
In 2012, The Guardian reported15 that social media-related crime reports had risen 780% in four years. Data from the British police showed 4,908 crimes in 2012 had been committed in which Facebook or Twitter was a factor. According to a June 4, 2012, article16 in Mail Online, 12,300 crime cases had been linked to Facebook, with a crime happening on the platform every 40 minutes.
News reports from 201417 and 201518 noted the number of crime cases linked to Facebook and Twitter was continuing to climb precipitously, including sexual offenses, harassment, and outright death threats.
Of course, when we start talking about intelligence agencies’ use of big tech services the stakes get even higher. The CIA, for example, which has a history of mind control abuses and secret assassination programs,19 uses Amazon web services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.20
Are these companies taking responsibility for atrocities committed by the CIA, such as its “deadly double tap” drone strikes in Pakistan that caused outrage in 2012?21 Is Amazon taking responsibility for the actions of DARPA, since it’s hosting DARPA and provides them with cloud services?22
Matze also pointed out that the allegation that Parler can or should be held responsible for the January 6, 2021, violence in Washington, D.C., is false for a number of reasons. First of all, Parler does not have a group feature that will allow people to organize. In fact, Facebook groups were used to plan that and other protests that turned violent.
Secondly, peaceful protests are protected under the U.S. Constitution, and therefore blocking the planning of such events would be unconstitutional. “Bad actors” turned what was a peaceful protest into a riot. Incidentally, the same happened during many protests held during 2020.
In response to the Parler ban, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is calling for a racketeering investigation into Big Tech, saying Amazon, Apple, and Google’s suspension of the Twitter competitor is “clearly a violation of antitrust, civil rights and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.”23
Indeed, according to October 2020, report24 by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google all have monopoly power and are using that power to rid themselves of competition.
Then there’s the great social media purge, which began in earnest on January 7 and 8, 2021, with the permanent ban of President Trump and a long list of other conservatives from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. According to some reports, Twitter suspended more than 70,000 accounts during its weekend purge.
Again, the primary excuse given was that these individuals may incite violence. Other justifications include posting “misleading information about the election outcome” or statements suggesting there was election fraud.25 Even signed witness affidavits and live testimony have been censored since election day.26 As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:27
“In the Trump tweets cited by Twitter, Trump stated that he will not be attending the inauguration and referred to his supporters as ‘American Patriots,’ saying they will have ‘a GIANT VOICE long into the future.’
Twitter said these statements ‘are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so’ …
In a lengthy monologue,28 Zuckerberg claims: ‘[Trump’s] decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the U.S. and around the world.
However, Zuckerberg’s statement seems to deviate from reality. In an increasingly hard-to-find video29 by Trump on the day of the Electoral College count, the outgoing president asked both his supporters and the rioters to be peaceful:
‘We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order and we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.'”
Contrast this scenario with all the violence and property destruction that was done by the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer and was clearly orchestrated over the Google, Apple, and Twitter platforms. The violence and damage were exponentially worse, yet not a word of censoring these platforms was ever mentioned.
The Gab social network also claims to be under coordinated attack. According to Gab CEO Andrew Torba, there’s been a suspicious rise in violent content on the site that doesn’t appear to be generated by real users. In a January 8, 2021, statement, Torba said:30
“Over the past several weeks I have been openly warning the Gab community to be on the lookout for fedposters and threats or encouragement of violence on Gab.
This PSYOP campaign started back in early December with newly created accounts popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence. We have zero tolerance for this behavior and it is absolutely not free speech.
This has always been our policy. We have thousands of volunteers, customers, and longtime community members who helped us stomp out this PSYOP campaign over the past several weeks and expose it. After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.
Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims.
I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading.”
While “incitement of violence” is being used as the justification for banning social media accounts, Facebook’s suspension of Dr. Ron Paul, a former Republican congressman for Texas and presidential candidate in 2011, punctures that narrative. He’s one of the most peaceful antiwar personalities out there.
However, he’s also an outspoken defender of civil liberties and health freedom. In September 2020, he interviewed me for his Liberty Report, discussing strategies to boost your immune system.31 Paul also promotes sound money and exposes political and financial corruption, so perhaps this is where the problem lies. In a January 11, 2021, Twitter post, Paul noted:32
“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified. The only thing we posted to Facebook today was my weekly ‘Texas Straight Talk’ column, which I have published every week since 1976.”
The article in question apparently discussed a “shocking increase in censorship on social media,” though,33 which may have tripped Facebook’s blocking apparatus. Discussing the incident in an article on RonPaulInstitute.org, Jonathan Turley writes:34
“Paul, a libertarian leader and former presidential candidate, has been an outspoken critic of foreign wars and an advocate for civil liberties for decades … His son, United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted, ‘Facebook now considers advocating for liberty to be sedition. Where will it end?’
Even before the riot, Democrats were calling for blacklists and retaliation against anyone deemed to be ‘complicit’ with the Trump Administration.
We have been discussing the rising threats against Trump supporters, lawyers, and officials in recent weeks from Democratic members are calling for blacklists to the Lincoln Project leading a national effort to harass and abuse any lawyers representing the Republican Party or President Trump.
Others are calling for banning those ‘complicit’ from college campuses while still others are demanding a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ to ‘hold Trump and his enablers accountable for the crimes they have committed.’
Daily Beast editor-at-large Rick Wilson has added his own call for ‘humiliation,’ ‘incarceration’ and even ritualistic suicides for Trump supporters in an unhinged, vulgar column … Also, a top Forbes editor Randall Lane warned any company that they will be investigated if they hire any former Trump officials.
The riots are being used as a license to roll back on free speech and retaliate against conservatives. In the meantime, the silence of academics and many in the media is deafening …
The move against Paul, a long champion of free speech, shows how raw and comprehensive this crackdown has become … It is like having a state media without state control … As we have seen in Europe, such censorship becomes an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech control.”
In the video35 featured at the top of this article, Paul discusses the dangers of big tech censorship. Unfortunately, he falls short on solutions in that video. In my view, one key strategy that we must focus on is to uphold the Constitution. If you want to live in a free society, you must first understand what a free society is, so educate yourself about your Constitutional rights. As noted by Greenwald:36
“On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?”
According to Big Tech, free speech is “dangerous.” I guess a follow-up question to such a statement would be: “To whom?” As mentioned earlier, agencies such as DARPA are using the online services of private companies, and according to independent journalist Whitney Webb,37 the COVID-19 pandemic has given “a dangerous boost to DARPA’s darkest agenda.”
“Given this foreknowledge and the numerous simulations conducted in the United States last year regarding global viral pandemic outbreaks, at least six of varying scope and size, it has often been asked — Why did the government not act or prepare if an imminent global pandemic and the shortcomings of any response to such an event were known?” Webb writes.38
“Though the answer to this question has frequently been written off as mere ‘incompetence’ in mainstream media circles, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a crisis was allowed to unfold. Why would the intelligence community or another faction of the U.S. government knowingly allow a crisis such as this to occur?
The answer is clear if one looks at history, as times of crisis have often been used by the U.S. government to implement policies that would normally be rejected by the American public, ranging from censorship of the press to mass surveillance networks.”
She goes on to review some of these historical events, and some of the DARPA-developed technologies that are now likely to come into play, from DNA and RNA vaccines to implantable biosensors and nanoplatforms said to detect disease.
If history is our guide, could the clamp-down on free speech be part of a bigger control and manipulation agenda — one that is directed not toward foreign enemies but the local population?
Might it be part of the Great Reset agenda, with its transhumanist bend? As explained by Webb in her article, DARPA has a transhumanist vision for the military, so why not for the general population? Especially seeing how its “health-based” biotechnologies end up meshing so seamlessly with new surveillance technologies.
I believe there may be some truth in that. Most certainly, big tech and social media monopolies are playing a central role in the social engineering currently taking place to pave the way for the technocratic “reset” of the global economy and way of life. That plan simply cannot occur without a sufficient number of the population being onboard with authoritarian conduct.
Greenwald has been a longstanding progressive and no fan of the Republican party, yet he notes that Silicon Valley giants may also be catering to the Democratic party in the hopes they won’t be regulated.
“The Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries,” Greenwald writes.39
“This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri: ‘It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump’s destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them.'”
While many appear to be caught up in the schadenfreude of the moment, basking in the perceived power of cancel culture, make no mistake — the censorship will not be limited to conservatives. Years ago, I warned that online censorship would not end at alternative health sites like mine, and guess what? It didn’t. Then I warned it would not stop at questioning vaccine safety, and of course, it didn’t.
In 2020, discussions about certain medical treatments for COVID-19, the sensibility of mask-wearing, and the origin of the virus all became targets for massive censoring and de-platforming. Next came bans on criticism against protests that frequently turned violent. Now one political party is being silenced en masse.
Make no mistake. Eventually, all will be targeted. The acceptable speech will continue to narrow until everyone has something to lose by opening their mouth and expressing an opinion. It’s inevitable, which is why supporting censorship is so ill-advised. As noted by Greenwald:40
“The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself ‘disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is’ and added that ‘it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.’
She nonetheless praised these ‘young tech titans’ for using their ‘dangerous’ power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced …
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies.
They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President … Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group … found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming …
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley ‘be put on the no-fly list’ …
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil … that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive.
That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.”
Censorship is never directed to specific groups, eventually, it is applied to anything deemed threatening to the ruling class. So, while you wait for a decentralized, censorship-free internet, what can you do to protect your online privacy and your right to free speech? Here are a few suggestions:
| Switch from Facebook and Twitter to free-speech alternatives41 such as Gab, MeWe, Minds (and Parler if they manage to come back). |
| Switch from YouTube to uncensored alternatives42 such as Bitchute, Brighteon, Banned.video, and Thinkspot. |
| Download the Signal or Telegram app to encrypt your text messages. Telegram also allows you to subscribe to channels (read-only messages are sent to your phone from any channel you subscribe. This feature is starting to be increasingly used by individuals who have been banned on other social media platforms). |
| Use a VPN on your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices to preserve your privacy. |
| For content creators and alternative news sources that no longer have a social media presence due to censoring, subscribe to their newsletter if available, and/or mark their website in your favorites and check back on a regular basis. |
Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:
|
Source: AwakenWithJP
Having trouble interpreting what’s really going on in the world? Of course you can always trust the media to lead the way to the promised land of truth. Here’s how the media wants you to think- according to JP and friends.
By Whitney Webb | The Defender
In just the past week, the national-security states of the U.S. and UK have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to COVID-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the U.K.’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored COVID-19 vaccine development and the multinational pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the U.S., with the U.S. military recently funding a CIA-backed firm — stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State — to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the COVID-19 crisis and the U.S. military-led COVID-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored COVID-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s COVID vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the U.S. and U.K. national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the COVID-19 vaccination endeavor.
U.K. intelligence’s new cyberwar targeting “anti-vaccine propaganda”
The U.K. newspaper The Times reported that the U.K.’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the U.K. government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyberwar” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyber-actors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the U.K. national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental COVID-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the U.S. government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the U.S. recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The U.S. government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a U.S. government contractor stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the U.K. government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the U.K. government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyberwar will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the U.K. government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the U.K. government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the U.K. newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that poses a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to U.S. intelligence — whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency (NSA), will take part in the newly announced “cyberwar ”— argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis that “the U.S. ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the U.S. anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far-right …and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government-aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The U.S. anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making COVID-19 vaccines donate heavily to politicians in both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyberwar against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the U.K. is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
A CIA-backed firm “weaponizing truth” with AI
In early October, the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the U.S.-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. The primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on Nov. 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the U.S. website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “COVID-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection, and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD … This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter COVID-19-related disinformation in near-real-time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new COVID-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the U.S. intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the U.S. National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the U.S. Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s disinformation blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the U.S. and U.K. national-security states toward COVID-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the U.S. military and also involves several U.S. intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabond by this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners — especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences — is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as the main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the COVID-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
Given that the COVID-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the U.S. national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
Published with permission from Unlimited Hangout.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.
Are you safe online? Or are you a potential victim of hackers? If you are reading this, then the chances are that you are worried about how safe you are when surfing the web. Keep reading below to find out how to protect yourself.
Everybody is talking about online security these days. With hacks, scams, hackers, malware, and more, the web seems to be a dangerous place. And, the growing use of devices, from smartphones, tablets, laptops, and even Internet-connected appliances, opens up to even greater risks and cybersecurity threats.
Yet, the good news is that even a small handful of security measures can significantly reduce our exposure to all these cyber threats. Here are four tips for staying safe online.
Image source: Unsplash
We know you’ve heard this one before, but it is so important that it is worth mentioning it again. Creating complex and unique passwords significantly reduce the risk of being a victim of hackers or online scams.
How to create strong passwords and beat hackers? Well, first of all, stay away from the obvious like sequential numbers or letters. And, by no means use the word “password” as your password. Instead, think of unique passwords that do not include any of your personal information such as date of birth, your dog’s name, or your town name because if you are specifically targeted, these passwords will be the first the hackers will use to access your accounts.
Use letters, numbers, and unique characters in your passwords.
Residential proxies are a great tool to stay safe online because they help you keep your anonymity online. These servers give you an IP address other than the real IP address of your device. So, when you surf the web, the websites you access and make a search request on will not see your real IP but the proxy’s IP address. Thus, this makes you “anonymous” to the website you’re visiting.
Yet, when you want to buy static residential proxy, make sure you research the provider to ensure that they are trustworthy and protect your identity as promised.
There are some tricks and tools that help you improve your chances of not being the victim of a cyberattack or online scam. Yet, besides that smart tech measures, you also need to make sure that you don’t invite cyber threats with careless clicking yourself.
If you want to make sure that you avoid becoming a victim of phishing or social engineering, avoid clicking on any suspicious link sent to you by an email address or person you don’t personally know or trust.
These days, it seems like a normal thing to share personal information online, right? You share your name, favorite book or food, photos of your dog, and much other stuff with your social media friends. Yet, while sharing a photo of your furry friend might not necessarily be a threat to your online security, sharing really personal information like address, email, phone number, or financial details is definitely a no-no. Such information can be used by hackers to steal your identity and wreak havoc in your life or finances.
By Children’s Health Defense Team
Last week, Children’s Health Defense launched The Defender, a news and views website that explores the theme of small (children) vs. Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Energy, Big Food, and Big Chemical.
In his “Welcome to The Defender” post, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described The Defender as “an online news site to evade official censorship, to report fact-based news and sponsor the kind of honest debate that terrifies the new generation of corporate and government commissars.”
This week, Kennedy delves a little deeper into the “why” behind The Defender in the below-featured video.
“Corporations don’t want an informed public,” Kennedy says. “They don’t want a public that reads the science, or asks too many questions … We need to find a common ground, and that common ground is science. That’s why we’re building this institution, The Defender.”
Watch here:
https://youtu.be/-cpQFbufjhY
[Image Courtesy of @ian-panelo | Pexels.com]
By Mayukh Saha | Truth Theory
Nadub, a 10 years old boy from England has recently made history. This elementary school student took part in an online competition where he solved 196 math sums within a minute to create a Guinness World Record! Nadub Gill’s talent was captured on video and shared online. Netizens can barely believe this excellent feat of this young boy.
Times Tables Rock Stars is an online math table learning app and site. It collaborated with Guinness World Records to organize a competition among school students to find who could make the highest score on their game in under a minute. Nadub took part along with seven hundred others and won the competition. Not only did he solve 196 math sums in a minute, but all his answers were spot on!
Nottingham Post reported that this 10 years old boy from Longmoor Primary School, Long Eaton, managed to beat everyone else in the competition. His speed and precision in solving those math sums got him Guinness World Record! Nadub told NP that he was extremely happy and excited about winning the competition and creating the record. “It is like a dream,” he said.
Guinness World Records presented the boy with a certificate for his feat. Guinness’ Editor-in-Chief, Craig Glenday mentioned how all the participants performed very well and watching them was “mind-boggling”. He appreciated the mental and physical dexterity that these kids command, especially the 10 years old winner. He was pleased to welcome Nadub to the GWR family.
We live in a world where, most would agree, there is a lot that goes on that we will never know about. For some of us, one of the most liberating things is the ability to be a skeptic – to open our eyes and deal with the world not with naivete, but with a questioning mind. Indeed, there are plenty who champion the internet and social media for being a way of getting the facts to people without a filter and without bias.
There is no doubt that a world can’t really work properly without an informed populace. Whatever your own personal views on an issue, or on the world in general, it has to be a good thing if more people know more about how the world works. Informed decisions are, by their very nature, better decisions than gut reactions. However, the flip side of this is that getting informed, staying informed, and processing the information you have is difficult to do.
Avoiding confirmation bias is tough
It is very easy to fall into a trap of only believing stories, or interpretations on a story, that we would like to be true. When we read something, no matter the source, we very quickly judge whether the information has the “ring of truth” about it. Very often, we decide that it does simply because it chimes with how we understand the world. It’s advisable to check in with a source or two that you don’t usually agree with, and to fact check your preferred sources. Because let’s face it, what are the chances that you’re right 100% of the time?
A narrow focus will only harm your attention span
When you feel that you have had your eyes opened on a particular issue, it can be hard to think about anything else, and if you do shift your attention, you can still be looking at it through a filter. If you’re focusing too hard on government and foreign policy, you can lose sight of healthcare matters. If you’re reading everything you can on epidemiology, you might flat out miss things like angel numbers. Opening your eyes is just one part of being an attentive person. Part Two is standing back and surveying everything critically.
It’s OK to disagree; especially among like minds
Similarly to the point about focusing too narrowly, you can waste a lot of time by trying to get people to see the world (and everything in it) from your point of view. Ask yourself, does that sound like free thinking? Can you really decry how people “just believe everything they’re told” and then have an issue when someone challenges what you tell them? People who you consider friends and allies will disagree with you about some things. That’s better than the alternative; disagreement sharpens our own arguments and shows we’re thinking.
It is more than fine to view the world through a skeptical lens, but it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking everyone else is a drone who blindly obeys authority. None of us has all the answers, and we have to get there in our own time.
Coronavirus! Lockdown! Covid-19! Stay At Home! Let us out!! Put your mask on…
George Floyd…
This sh*t is tiring!
Join us on Jun 6th, 2020 for a virtual wellness festival called ‘Spiritual Block Party: A Celebration of Life’. This festival is free for participants, and you can participate from the comfort of your own home or with a group of friends!
The Spiritual Block Party originated with one intent — creating and sharing experiences. We understand ourselves and our world through our experiences and we can upgrade ourselves through our experiences. Experiences move people to feel differently from their normal which is the space of transformation.
Spiritual Block Party has 7 experiential sessions in two areas of focus — Movement (Laughter Yoga; Tai Chi; Ganja Yoga), and Meditation (Full Chakra Activation; Trypknowledgy Shamanic Sound Voyage; Prana and Breathwork). We end the festival with an Open Mic hosted by Portal To Ascension’s Neil Gaur.
Why 6/6?!? The number 6 represents a “balance between earth and spirit”, a balance between the material and spiritual. It teaches us to focus on our inner journey. We invest most of our time on our goals and aspirations, on our relationships with people, or on watching TV! This is a great reminder in these challenging and distracting times.
The Movement track contains active elements like yoga, workout, dance, tai chi, or movement meditation while the meditation track involves stationary healing work like guided meditations, breathwork, and sound healings. Balance!
When the world was still normal, Spiritual Block Party held it’s first to live experience in South LA on Feb 15th, 2020 where 1500 people attended 12 sessions in 3 tracks – Meditation, Movement, and Nutrition. Past festival supporters include prominent vegan brands like Suja Juice, Follow Your Heart, GT’s Kombucha, Califia Farms, and Vegan Robs. Here’s what I have been missing for the last 3 months: (highlight video of our first Spiritual Block Party)
Did I mention that this festival is FREE and you can access it from ANYWHERE in the world?!?
TO FIND OUT MORE/RSVP: SpiritualBlockParty.com
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | mercola.com
Robert Epstein, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1981 and served as the former editor in chief at Psychology Today, is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google’s manipulative and deceptive practices. He explains what got him interested in investigating the internet search monopoly in the first place:
“In 2012, January 1st, I received some emails from Google saying my website contained malware and that they were somehow blocking access. This means I had gotten onto one of Google’s blacklists.
My website did contain some malware. It was pretty easy to get rid of, but it turns out it’s hard to get off of a Google blacklist. That’s a big problem. I started looking at Google just a little bit differently.
I wondered, first of all, why they were notifying me about this rather than some government agency or some nonprofit organization? Why was a private company notifying me?
In other words, who made Google sheriff of the internet? Second, I learned they had no customer service department, which seemed very strange, so if you have a problem with Google, then you have a problem because they don’t help you solve the problem.
I learned also that although you can get onto a blacklist in a split second, it can take weeks to get off a blacklist. There have been businesses that have gotten onto their blacklists and have gone out of business while they’re trying to straighten out the problem.
The thing that really caught my eye — because I’ve been a programmer my whole life — was I couldn’t figure out how they were blocking access to my website, not just through their own products … Google.com, the search engine, or through Chrome, which is their browser, but through Safari, which is an Apple product, through Firefox, which is a browser run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization.
How was Google blocking access through so many different means? The point is I just started to get more curious about the company, and later in 2012, I happened to be looking at a growing literature, which was about the power of search rankings to impact sales.
This was in the marketing field and it just was astonishing. In other words, if you could push yourself up one more notch in their search results, that could make the difference between success or failure for your company; it could mean a lot more income.
It turns out that this initial research was saying that people really trust those higher ranked search results. I simply asked a question. I wondered whether, if people trust those higher rank search results, I could use search results to influence people’s opinions, maybe even their votes.”
What Epstein discovered through his subsequent research, which began in 2013, is that yes, biased search results can indeed be used to influence public opinion and sway undecided voters. What’s more, the strength of that influence was shocking.
He also eventually discovered how Google is able to block website access on browsers other than their own. His findings were published in 2016 in U.S. News & World Report.1
Google’s powers pose three specific threats to society:
1. They’re a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers. As noted by Epstein:
“The search engine … Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance platforms. In other words, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do.”
2. They’re a censoring agency with the ability to restrict or block access to websites across the internet, thus deciding what people can and cannot see. They even have the ability to block access to entire countries and the internet as a whole.
The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If a certain type of information is removed from search, and you don’t know it should exist somewhere, you’ll never go looking for it. And, when searching for information online, how would you know that certain websites or pages have been removed from the search results in the first place? The answer is, you don’t.
For example, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for quite a long time, and are adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but articles about that — which he has cited in his own writings — have all vanished.
3. They have the power to manipulate public opinion through search rankings and other means.
“To me, that’s the scariest area,” Epstein says, “because Google is shaping the opinions, thinking, beliefs, attitudes, purchases and votes of billions of people around the world without anyone knowing that they’re doing so … and perhaps even more shocking, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.
They’re using new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history and they are for the most part, subliminal … but they don’t produce tiny shifts.
They produce enormous shifts in people’s thinking, very rapidly. Some of the techniques I’ve discovered are among the largest behavioral effects ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.”
While surveillance is Google’s primary business, its revenue — which exceeds $130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you’ve provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience.
Epstein’s controlled, randomized, double-blind, and counterbalanced experiments have revealed a number of different ways in which Google can shift public perception. The first effect he discovered is called SEME, which stands for search engine manipulation effect. For a full description of the basic experiment used to identify this effect, please listen to the interview.
In summary, the aim of his experiment was to see whether search results biased toward a particular political candidate would be capable of shifting users’ political opinions and leanings.
“I had predicted, when we first did this, that we would get a shift,” Epstein says, “because … people do trust higher ranked search results, and of course we had biased the search results so that, if in that first group, someone was clicking on a high-ranking search result, that would connect them to a webpage which made one candidate look much better than the other …
I predicted we could get a shift in voting preferences of 2% to 3%. I was way off. We got … a shift of 48%, which I thought must be an error because that’s crazy …
I should note that in almost all of our experiments, especially those early ones, we deliberately used undecided voters. That’s the key. You can’t easily push the opinions or voting preferences of people who are partisan, who are strongly committed to one party or another, but people who are undecided, those are the people who are very vulnerable. In our experiments, we always find a way to use undecided voters.
In these early experiments, the way we guaranteed that our voters were undecided was by using people from the U.S. as our participants, but the election we chose was the 2010 election for the prime minister of Australia.
They’re real candidates, a real election, real search results, real webpages, and of course, because our participants were from the U.S. they were not familiar with the candidates.
In fact, that’s why, before they do the search, we get this almost perfect 50/50 split regarding who they’re going to vote for, because they don’t know these candidates. The information they’re getting from the search, that, presumably, is why we get a shift.”
Another thing Epstein noticed was that very few seemed to realize they were seeing biased search results. In other words, the manipulation went virtually undetected.
In a second experiment, they were able to achieve a 63% shift in voter preference, and by masking the bias — simply by inserting a pro-opponent result here and there — they were able to hide the bias from almost everyone.
“In other words, we could get enormous shifts in opinions and voting preferences with no one being able to detect the bias in the search results we were showing them,” Epstein says. “This is where, again, it starts to get scary. Scarier still is when we moved on to do a national study of more than 2,000 people in all 50 states.”
What this large-scale investigation revealed is that the few who actually notice the bias are not protected from its effects. Curiously, they actually shift even further toward the bias, rather than away from it.
As evidenced by other studies, the pattern of clicks is a key factor that makes search bias so powerful: 50% of all search selections go to the top two items and 95% of all clicks go to the first page of search results.
“In other words, people spend most of their time clicking on and reading content that comes from high-ranking search results. If those high-ranking search results favor one candidate, that’s pretty much all they see and that impacts their opinions and their voting preferences,” Epstein says.
Subsequent experiments revealed that this click pattern is the result of conditioning. Most of the things people search for are simple matters such as local weather or the capital of a country. The most appropriate and correct answer is always at the very top. This conditions them to assume that the best and truest answer is always the most high-ranked listing.
The ramifications of the search engine manipulation effect can be immense. Of course, having the power to shift public opinion is one thing; actually using that power is another. So, Epstein’s next target was to determine whether Google is using its power of influence or not.
“Early 2016, I set up the first-ever monitoring system, which allowed me to look over the shoulders of people as they were conducting election-related searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. I had 95 field agents (as we call them), in 24 states.
We kept their identities secret, which took a lot of work. And this is exactly, by the way, what the Nielsen company does to generate ratings for television shows. They have several thousand families. Their identities are secret. They equip the families with special boxes, which allow Nielsen to tabulate what programs they’re watching …
Inspired by the Nielsen model, we recruited our field agents, we equipped them with custom passive software. In other words, no one could detect the fact that they have the software in their computers. But that software allowed us to look over their shoulders as they conducted election related searches …
We ended up preserving 13,207 election-related searches and the nearly 100,000 webpages to which the search results linked … After the election, we rated the webpages for bias, either pro-Clinton or pro-Trump … and then we did an analysis to see whether there was any bias in the search results people were seeing.
The results we got were crystal clear, highly significant statistically … at the 0.001 level. What that says is we can be confident the bias we were seeing was real, and it didn’t occur because of some random factors. We found a pro-Clinton bias in all 10 search positions on the first page of Google search results, but not on Bing or Yahoo.
That’s very important. So, there was a significant pro-Clinton bias on Google. Because of the experiments I had been doing since 2013, I was also able to calculate how many votes could have been shifted with that level of bias… At bare minimum, about 2.6 million [undecided] votes would have shifted to Hillary Clinton.”
On the high end, Google’s biased search results may have shifted as many as 10.4 million undecided voters toward Clinton, which is no small feat — all without anyone realizing they’d been influenced, and without leaving a trace for the authorities to follow.
According to Epstein’s calculations, tech companies, Google being the main one, can shift 15 million votes leading up to the 2020 election, which means they have the potential to select the next president of the United States.
Many who look at Epstein’s work end up focusing on Google’s ability to influence U.S. politics, but the problem is much bigger than that.
“As I explained when I testified before Congress, the reason why I’m speaking out about these issues is because, first of all, I … think it’s important that we preserve democracy and preserve the free and fair election. To me, it’s pretty straight forward.
But the problem is much bigger than elections or democracy or the United States. Because I calculated back in 2015 that … Google’s search engine — because more than 90% of searches worldwide are conducted on Google — was determining the outcomes of upwards of 25% of the national elections in the world.
How can that be? Well, it’s because a lot of elections are very close. And that’s the key to understanding this. In other words, we actually looked at the win margins in national elections around the world, which tend to be very close. In that 2010 Australian election, for example, the win margin was something like 0.2% …
If the results they’re getting on Google are biased toward one candidate, that shifts a lot of votes among undecided people. And it’s very, very simple for them to flip an election or … rig an election … It’s very, very simple for Google to do that.
They can do it deliberately, which is kind of scary. In other words, some top executives at Google could decide who they want to win an election in South Africa or the U.K. or anywhere. It could be just a rogue employee at Google who does it. You may think that’s impossible … [but] it’s incredibly simple …
[A] senior software engineer at Google, Shumeet Baluja, who’s been at Google almost since the very beginning, published a novel that no one’s ever heard of called ‘The Silicon Jungle’ … It’s fictional, but it’s about Google, and the power that individual employees at Google have to make or break any company or any individual.
It’s a fantastic novel. I asked Baluja how Google let him get away with publishing it and he said, ‘Well, they made me promise I would never promote it.’ That’s why no one’s ever heard of this book.”
Another, and even more frightening possibility, is that Google could allow its biased algorithm to favor one candidate over another without caring about which candidate is being favored.
“That’s the scariest possibility,” Epstein says, “because now you’ve got an algorithm, a computer program, which is an idiot … deciding who rules us. It’s crazy.”
While this sounds like it should be illegal, it’s not, because there are no laws or regulations that restrict or dictate how Google must rank its search results. Courts have actually concluded that Google is simply exercising its right to free speech, even if that means destroying the businesses they demote in their search listings or blacklistings.
The only way to protect ourselves from this kind of hidden influence is by setting up monitoring programs such as Epstein’s all over the world. “As a species, it’s the only way we can protect ourselves from new types of online technologies that can be used to influence us,” he says. “No dictator anywhere has ever had even a tiny fraction of the power that this company has.”
Epstein is also pushing for the government to make the Google search index a public commons, which would allow other companies to create competing for search platforms using Google’s database. While Google’s search engine cannot be broken up, its monopoly would be thwarted by forcing it to hand over its index to other search platform developers.
In 2016, Epstein also discovered the remarkable influence of search suggestions — the suggested searches shown in a drop-down menu when you begin to type a search term. This effect is now known as the search suggestion effect or SSE. Epstein explains:
“Initially the idea was they were going to save you time. That’s the way they presented this new feature. They were going to anticipate, based on your history, or based on what other people are searching for, what it is you’re looking for so you don’t have to type the whole thing. Just click on one of the suggestions. But then it changed into something else. It changed into a tool for manipulation.
In June 2016, a small news organization … discovered that it was virtually impossible to get negative search suggestions related to Hillary Clinton, but easy to get them for other people including Donald Trump. They were very concerned about this because maybe that could influence people somehow.
So, I tried this myself, and I have a wonderful image that I preserved showing this. I typed in ‘Hillary Clinton is’ on Bing and on Yahoo, and I got those long lists, eight and 10 items, saying, ‘Hillary Clinton is the devil. Hillary Clinton is sick’ … all negative things that people were actually searching for.
How do I know that? Because we checked Google trends. Google trends shows you what people are actually searching for. Sure enough, people were actually searching for all these negative things related to Hillary Clinton. Those [were] the most popular search terms.
So, we tried it on Google and we got, ‘Hillary Clinton is winning, Hillary Clinton is awesome.’ Now you check those phrases on Google trends and you find no one is searching for ‘Hillary Clinton is awesome.’ Nobody. Not one. But that’s what they’re showing you in their search suggestions.
That again got my research gears running. I started doing experiments because I said, ‘Wait a minute, why would they do this? What is the point?’
Here’s what I found in a series of experiments: Just by manipulating search suggestions, I could turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split — with no one having the slightest idea that they’ve been manipulated.”
YouTube, which is owned by Google, also has an enormous influence on public opinion. According to Epstein, 70% of the videos people view on YouTube are suggested by Google’s top-secret Up Next algorithm, which recommends videos for you to view whenever you’re watching a video.
Just like the search suggestions, this is a phenomenally effective ephemeral manipulation tool. There’s no record of the videos recommended by the algorithm, yet it can take you down the proverbial rabbit hole by feeding you one video after another.
“There are documented cases now in which people have been converted to extreme Islam or to white supremacy, literally because they’d been pulled down a rabbit hole by a sequence of videos on YouTube,” Epstein says.
“Think of that power. Again, it’s not powerful for people who already have strong opinions. It’s powerful for the people who don’t, the people who are vulnerable, the people who are undecided or uncommitted. And that’s a lot of people.”
Most people now have Amazon Prime. If you are one of those who do, you can watch the following documentary for free on Prime. It is well worth your time to do so. Epstein and many other experts provide a very compelling overview of the dangers that we discuss in our interview. In my view, this is a must-watch and one to recommend to your friends and family.
A question Epstein raises is, “Who gave this private company, which is not accountable to any of us, the ability to determine what billions of people around the world will see or will not see?”
That is perhaps one of the biggest issues. Epstein and others attempt to answer this question in this documentary, “The Creepy Line,” which is a direct quote from Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt.
“Traditional media have very serious constraints placed on them, but Google, which is far more penetrating and far more effective at influencing people, has none of these constraints,” Epstein says.
“There are lots of good people in [‘The Creepy Line’], lots of good data, and it explains my research very clearly, which is wonderful. It explains my research better than I explain my research. ‘The Creepy Line’ is available on iTunes and on Amazon. I think it costs $3 or $4 to watch … If you’re an Amazon Prime Member it’s free. It’s an excellent film.”
In his article2 “Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy,” Epstein outlines his recommendations for protecting your privacy while surfing the web, most of which don’t cost anything. You can access the article at MySevenSimpleSteps.com
“My first sentence is ‘I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone since 2014.’ Most people are shocked by that because they’re bombarded with targeted ads constantly.
More and more people are telling me that they’re just having a conversation with someone, so they’re not even doing anything online per se, but their phone is nearby — or they’re having a conversation in their home and they have Amazon Alexa or Google Home, these personal assistants — and the next thing they know they start getting targeted ads related to what they were talking about.
This is the surveillance problem … The point is that there are ways to use the internet, tablets and mobile phones, to preserve or protect your privacy, but almost no one does that. So, the fact is that we’re now being surveilled 24/7, generally speaking, with no awareness that we’re even being surveilled.
Maybe some people are aware that when they do searches on Google the search history is preserved forever … But it goes so far beyond that because now we’re being surveilled through personal assistants, so that when we speak, we’re being [surveilled].
It goes even beyond that, because a few years ago Google bought the Nest company, which makes a smart thermostat. After they bought the company, they put microphones into the smart thermostats, and the latest versions of the smart thermostats have microphones and cameras.
Google has been issued patents in recent years, which give them, basically, ownership rights over ways of analyzing sounds that are picked up by microphones in people’s homes.
They can hook you up with dentists, they can hook you up with sex therapists, with mental health services, relationship coaches, et cetera. So, there’s that. Location tracking has also gotten completely out of hand. We’ve learned in recent months that even when you disable location tracking … on your mobile phone, you’re still being tracked.”
This is one of the reasons I strongly recommend that you use a VPN on your cellphone and computer, as this will prevent virtually anyone from tracking and targeting you. There are many out there but I am using the one Epstein recommends, Nord VPN, which is only about $3 per month and you can use it on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy.
You can learn a lot about a person by tracking their movements and whereabouts. Most of us are very naïve about these things. As explained by Epstein, location tracking technology has become incredibly sophisticated and aggressive.
Android cellphones, for example, which is a Google-owned operating system, can track you even when you’re not connected to the internet, whether you have geo-tracking enabled or not.
“It just gets creepier and creepier,” Epstein says. “Let’s say you pull out your SIM card. Let’s say you disconnect from your mobile service provider, so you’re absolutely isolated. You’re not connected to the internet. Guess what? Your phone is still tracking everything you do on that phone and it’s still tracking your location.”
As soon as you reconnect to the internet, all that information stored on your phone is sent to Google. So, even though you may think you’ve just spent the day incognito, the moment you reconnect, every step you’ve made is shared (provided you had your phone with you).
In terms of online tracking, it’s also important to realize that Google is tracking your movements online even if you’re not using their products because most websites use Google Analytics, which tracks everything you do on that website. And, you have no way of knowing whether a website uses Google Analytics or not.
To protect your privacy, Epstein recommends taking the following steps, seven of which are outlined in “Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy.” The last one, Fitbit, is a more recent concern.
Use a virtual private network (VPN) such as Nord, which is only about $3 per month and can be used on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy. Epstein explains:
Nord, when used on your cellphone, will also mask your identity when using apps like Google Maps. |
| Do not use Gmail, as every email you write is permanently stored. It becomes part of your profile and is used to build digital models of you, which allows them to make predictions about your line of thinking and every want and desire.
Many other older email systems such as AOL and Yahoo are also being used as surveillance platforms in the same way as Gmail. ProtonMail.com, which uses end-to-end encryption, is a great alternative and the basic account is free. |
| Don’t use Google’s Chrome browser, as everything you do on there is surveilled, including keystrokes and every web page you’ve ever visited. Brave is a great alternative that takes privacy seriously.
Brave is also faster than Chrome and suppresses ads. It’s based on Chromium, the same software infrastructure that Chrome is based on, so you can easily transfer your extensions, favorites, and bookmarks. |
| Don’t use Google as your search engine, or any extension of Google, such as Bing or Yahoo, both of which draw search results from Google. The same goes for the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri, which draws all of its answers from Google.
Alternative search engines suggested by Epstein include SwissCows and Qwant. He recommends avoiding StartPage, as it was recently bought by an aggressive online marketing company, which, like Google, depends on surveillance. |
| Don’t use an Android cellphone, for all the reasons discussed earlier. Epstein uses a Blackberry, which is more secure than Android phones or the iPhone. Blackberry’s upcoming model, the Key3, will be one of the most secure cellphones in the world, he says. |
| Don’t use Google Home devices in your house or apartment. These devices record everything that occurs in your home, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google’s home thermostat Nest, and Amazon’s Alexa. |
Clear your cache and cookies. As Epstein explains in his article:3
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| Don’t use Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you. |