Category Archives: REALLY!!!

It’s The Climate, Dummy

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Whitney Webb: Bankers Use Climate Scam in Latin America to Introduce Digital Currency Globally

May 13, 2024 Jimmy Dore and Unliimited Hangout 3

Wall Street bankers, intelligence agencies from the US, UK and Israel, tech billionaires and other powerful interests developed a scheme, GREEN+, to  entangle local governments across Latin America to take control of vast swaths of public lands for use as carbon credits. The ultimate objective is to monetize air, water and other resources as commodities.

The currency in Argentina has been devalued and people are being pushed into dollar-denominated stable coins like Tether that allows the FBI to spy on users. The goal is programmable currency, whether it is issued by central banks or private companies, that allows bankers to control the money and spending over all people.

Every capital city of latin America has eagerly signed on, unaware of the strings attached to the partnerships, paving the way for a sweeping surveillance apparatus tied to American intelligence under the guise of combating climate change.

.Latin America is quietly being forced into a carbon market scheme through regional contractual obligations – enforced by the satellites of a US intelligence-linked firm – which seeks to create an inter-continental “smart grid,” erode national and local sovereignty, and link carbon-based life to the debt-based monetary system via a Bitcoin sidechain.

Sweeping across the shores of Latin America comes a scheme from some of the most predatory figures in the venture capital ecosystem of the United States. It is a brazen attempt to assert foreign influence across Latin America and threatens to reshape the very fabric of the region and the day to day lives of its people. At its core is a serpentine set of contractual obligations, held at the municipal level, cast throughout Central and South America, upheld by an intelligence-linked satellite company, and controlled by a private se­ctor consortium of green-washed financiers aiming to turn the region’s forests into equity and carbon credits. At the same time, it obliges local governments to spend “conservation” funds on projects that further financialize nature and aid the construction of an inter-continental “smart” grid. One of its key ambitions appears to be further entrenching the debt load of the region through the multi-lateral development banks and the dollarization of the continent from the subnational level up through carbon markets upheld by a digital ledger. What seems like a technological marvel aimed at progress and connectivity harbors a darker agenda — one that intertwines planetary surveillance, financial predation, geopolitical maneuvering, and the domination of a resource-rich continent buried in debt.

This grand design, known by the acronym GREEN+ and conceived by stalwarts of the digital dollar and debt schemes of the private sector, has quietly taken root through a web of political entanglements at the local level. Even a key figure in the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal plays a role. Astonishingly, every capital city of Latin America has eagerly signed on, apparently unaware of the strings attached to these seemingly benign partnerships, while a majority of municipalities in the region have also made commitments with these same groups that will push them to join GREEN+, potentially in a matter of weeks. The (hopefully) well-meaning regional governments have unwittingly paved the way for a sweeping surveillance apparatus tied to American intelligence that threatens to erode privacy and civil liberties under the guise of progress and combating the climate crisis.

Upon further observation, GREEN+’s connections reveal a disturbing narrative of financial interests melding with geopolitical ambitions. The backers of the satellite company share ties with former members of the highest offices of US financial policy and regulation alongside the key architects and profiteers of private capital creation, aiming to consolidate control over monetary flows in Latin America within the redistribution of distressed government debt from the public to the private sector. As this two-part series will show, this concerted effort is not merely about surveillance – it’s a calculated move towards further dollarization, tightening the grip of corporate and technological monopolies over the economic landscape of the Americas.

The scheme’s proponents also speak of how it will significantly advance the “economic” and “regional” integration of the Americas, invoking visions of unity while obscuring the true nature of their agenda for economic domination and stronger regional governance. Their model, eerily reminiscent of the EU’s transition from a free trade union to a bureaucratic behemoth yoked to the US through the Eurodollar, sets the stage for unelected entities to enforce policies through programmable money, enabled by smart contracts on blockchains and designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. What materializes before us is not just a technological evolution but a quiet banker coup — one that lays the groundwork for land grabs and invasive surveillance under the guise of progress and conservation. It’s a narrative that echoes throughout history, where intelligence-linked figures and predatory financial interests converge to prey upon the Global South, leaving a trail of economic exploitation and geopolitical manipulation in their wake. What masquerades as progress for individuals and the environment at large may very well be the harbinger of a new era of subjugation and control.

THE GREEN+ PROGRAM

In 2022, several groups came together to launch the GREEN+ (Government Reduction of Emissions for Environmental Net + Gain) Jurisdictional Programme, the “first program that will monitor by satellite all subnational protected areas of the planet” and – through contracts with numerous local and state governments – propel and deepen the economic integration of the Americas through the quiet imposition of a continent-wide, blockchain-based carbon market.

GREEN+ has been piloted in a handful of Latin American cities since its founding and is due to launch globally in just a few weeks time. Most of the GREEN+ agreements with “subnational” governments have remained focused on Latin America. Per the program, the subnational agreements have established the “rules and requirements to enable accounting and crediting with GREEN+ policies and measures and/or nested projects, implemented as GHG mitigation activities,” with GREEN+ being described as “the planet’s new subnational government advisory mechanism.”

Key to the program are the services provided by GREEN+ founding member Satellogic, an Argentina-founded company closely aligned with Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX that specializes in sub-meter resolution satellite surveillance. Satellogic, a contractor to the US government and whose founders were also previously contactors for the US’ DHS, NSA and DARPA, will provide surveillance data of the entire world’s “protected areas” to GREEN+’s governing coalition, composed of the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network, The Energy Coalition and other “respected stakeholders.”

According to the press release that details Satellogic’s alliance with GREEN+, the satellite surveillance data “will enable individuals, organizations, and global markets to accurately monitor the compliance of signatory jurisdictions to avoid deforestation.” However, other information in the press release reveals that forests will actually be monitored for the purpose of generating “credible” carbon credits to be traded on exchanges by GREEN+ on behalf of subnational governments. The press release also states that the GREEN+ alliance with Satellogic will “advance the future measurement of energy emissions in the most populated areas of the planet,” i.e. the surveillance of carbon emissions from space. Satellogic launched some GREEN+-affiliated satellites in 2022 as part of its pilot and is due to launch the remainder this April during Miami Climate Week. Satellogic’s past and upcoming launches of GREEN+ satellites were/will be conducted in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, also a contractor to the US military and US intelligence agencies.

Though framed as a way to develop economic incentives to mitigate climate change, the program is based on California’s controversial and grift-prone cap and trade program and has been created (and is being implemented by) individuals and companies that are seeking to covertly dollarize Latin America and/or have deep ties to US intelligence. Its ultimate ambitions go far beyond carbon markets and seek to use satellite surveillance to enforce carbon emission levels in both urban and rural areas. It also seeks to impose a new financial system centered around energy, commodity, and natural resource “credits” that are underpinned by extensive and invasive surveillance, underscored by the motto: “Earth observation is preservation.”

The alliance that created GREEN+ includes the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network (GFN), Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Catalytic Finance Foundation (CFF, formerly R20) and The Energy Coalition (TEC); the Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas; the global insurance giant Lockton; the satellite company Satellogic; the “green” blockchain company EcoRegistry; the dominant carbon credit certifier in Latin America, Cercarbono; and Rootstock (RSK), the bitcoin side-chain protocol responsible for “smart BTC.” Several members of the alliance, though how many is unclear, now operate as part of a consortium linked to a company called Global Carbon Parks, which is discussed in greater detail later in this article and now manages major aspects of GREEN+. The NGOs (i.e. CC35, GFN, CFF and TEC) involved in founding GREEN+ are those who actually govern the GREEN+ program from California.

As previously mentioned, the program takes carbon in “effectively conserved protected areas of a sub-national jurisdiction”, i.e. a city, county, province, or state/region, and converts them into carbon credits. Per the program, “these credits are traded on the [carbon] offset market, and income is deposited in a trust fund” that is controlled by GREEN+ and is known as the GREEN+ Trust. That trust is run by unspecified individuals who work for Lockton, Isolas and Rootstock. Alejandro Guerrero, head of Lockton’s Argentina & Uruguay branch, is the only publicly acknowledged member of the trust.

Another website tied to the GREEN+ initiative describes the initial process as follows:

  1. Public and private agreements between [a subnational] government and custodians are signed with zero upfront cost.
  2. Custodians trade the carbon units that are produced by the subnational governments (the public sector) signing contracts with the private sector in voluntary carbon markets.
  3. Those contracts signed by the subnational governments become smart contracts and carbon credits are then tokenized for traceability.
  4. The GREEN+ Trust holds government funds in escrow.

Subsequently, “a partial release of trust funds is made periodically during the crediting period of the jurisdictional initiative.” From this “partial release,” “a percentage operational fee” is deducted (the percentage is undisclosed in the program’s documents) and paid to the GREEN+ program while a separate (and also undisclosed) fee is also deducted “for the operation of the GREEN+ Trust.” Disbursements of what remains are made annually over a ten year period and, per graphs produced by GREEN+, those payments remain the same, fixed value even if the value of the carbon credits of the protected areas grows.

Unlimited Hangout article:        https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/04/investigative-reports/debt-from-above-the-carbon-credit-coup/

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2024/05/whitney-webb-bankers-use-climate-scam-in-latin-america-to-introduce-digital-currency-globally/

Where Did All the Boy Scouts Go?

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Boy Scouts Officially Drop “Boy” From Their Name

 by James Murphy      
Boy Scouts Officially Drop “Boy” From Their Name
AP Images.  Roger Krone
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Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Once a bastion of traditional values, the Boy Scouts of America announced Tuesday that it will be changing its name to “Scouting America” to emphasize its commitment to inclusion. The name change will officially take effect in February of 2025.

The organization announced the name change as the organization celebrates the fifth anniversary of the decision to allow females scouts, and a decade after announcing that it would allow homosexuals to join.

Previously, in 2018, the group changed its name from Boy Scouts of America to Scouts BSA.

For many years, the organization has been under fire from left-wing activists who didn’t approve of the “God and country” values espoused by the group. The name change represents the group’s latest capitulation to far-left values and move away from its original ideals.

“Though our name will be new, our mission remains unchanged: we are committed to teaching young people to be Prepared. For Life,” said Roger Krone, the president of Scouting America. “This will be a simple but very important evolution as we seek to ensure that everyone feels welcome in Scouting.”

“Scouting America provides a welcoming, safe environment where youth can become the best version of themselves by learning from and respecting each other,” Krone stressed. “I encourage everyone to join us and experience the benefits of Scouting.”

When questioned by reporters about the name change, Krone explained, “Part of my job is to reduce all the barriers I possibly can for people to accept us as an organization and to join.”

The announcement to change names comes in the wake of the organization’s bankruptcy settlement, which will pay victims of sexual abuse in the group $2.46 billion. That settlement involves 82,000 men who claim they were abused by scout leaders over the years. Those settlements range from $3,500 to $2.7 million.

In 1972, the group boasted nearly 5 million members — all boys. Currently, it serves only a million members.

“Scouting America welcomes all of America’s youth into its programs. Our goal is to give them fantastic experiences in the outdoors, and elsewhere, where they can grow with us in a safe environment. More than 130 million Americans have been through our programs since our founding, and currently more than 1 million youth are served by 477,000 dedicated adult volunteers in local councils throughout the country,” the group’s website declares.

Angelique Minett, the first female chairperson of the group, believes the changes will be good for the group going forward.

“When we think scouts we think knots and camping, but those are a means to an end,” Minett said. “We are actually teaching kids a much bigger thing. We are teaching them how to have grit, and we’re teaching them life skills and we’re teaching them how to be good leaders.”

Thus far, the Girl Scouts remain the Girl Scouts but they appear to be affected with the same “woke” energy as their non-gender specific counterpart.

As X user Libs of TikTok points out: “If you don’t subscribe to the LGBTQ+ agenda, you’re not welcome at @girlscouts. Time to boycott @girlscouts and @boyscouts! They have both gone completely woke! Boys and girls both deserve their own spaces. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts disagree and would rather cater to a far-left agenda.”

As further proof of the Girl Scouts’ commitment to all things woke, Libs of Tik Tok posted the Girl Scouts’ Camp Culture Code, which states that the organization is “committed to actively building a sense of inclusion for all of our community members. We ask all staff, volunteers, parents, caregivers, and youth commit to working towards LGBTQIA+ allyship, anti-racism and anti-oppression.”

The Scouts have strayed far from their original oath, “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” It’s an unfortunate loss in the culture war as a group once committed to God and country now appears committed in the opposite direction.

from:    https://thenewamerican.com/us/culture/boy-scouts-officially-drop-boy-from-their-name/

When Friends are Actually Foes

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The FBI and CIA Are Enemies of the American People

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Mises WireRyan McMaken

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Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson sat down for a three-hour-plus discussion on the Joe Rogan Show last week, covering everything from UFOs, to religion and artificial intelligence. But perhaps the most important topic they covered was the insidious and dangerous role played by the US regime’s intelligence agencies in America.

Specifically, Carlson suggested the CIA continues to lobby for keeping the JFK files secret, possibly because the CIA had a role in the assassination. Tucker also brought up how the FBI’s second-in-command was responsible for taking down Richard Nixon. Carlson described how intelligence agencies hold immense power within Congress because members of Congress—who are generally disreputable people with many secrets—are terrified of being blackmailed. After all, in a post-Patriot Act world of nearly unrestrained spying by the US regime, there is no privacy in America.

I’ll let you, dear readers, listen to the full interview and make up your mind for yourselves as to the details of the discussion.

What I want to highlight here, however, is how remarkable it is that two major media figures—Rogan and Carlson—are announcing to their millions of listeners and readers that organizations like the CIA and the FBI are despicable agencies committed to undermining the legal and constitutional institutions of the United States.

This is long overdue.

Deep-state agencies like the CIA and the FBI have for far too long been considered reputable organizations just trying to “keep us safe” or somehow defend the United States from alleged foreign threats. Conservatives have long been among the worst offenders. Libertarians know this well, and have observed for decades the breed of “small-government” conservatives who one minute claim “the government can’t do anything right” and then the next minute simp for “heroic” CIA and FBI agents. People such as these have long checked their critical thinking skills at the door as soon as the discussion turns to the regime’s spy agencies—or the Pentagon, for that matter. This is not to say that Leftists are guiltless on this. While historically it was the Left that actually made some efforts to expose intelligence agencies and their crimes in the 1970s, that is now ancient history. The Left in 2024 has rarely met a regime spook it didn’t like. This was made explicit last month when Adam Westbrook and Lindsey Crouse declared in The New York Times that “the Deep State is actually kind of awesome.”

The job of opposing these contemptible enemies of freedom at America’s intelligence agencies—especially the FBI and CIA and NSA—falls to the minority of Americans who actually care about law and human rights enough to seek true restraints on regime power. Those of us in this minority must never miss an opportunity to disparage, doubt, question, and generally express loathing for these organizations and for every single agent and employee at these agencies who collects a taxpayer-funded salary.

A Danger for Many Decades 

Since at least the early 1960s, many have understood that the post-war intelligence agencies have posed an especially dangerous threat to the people of the United States. For example, exactly one month after Kennedy’s assassination—surely, just a coincidence!—former president Harry Truman expressed alarm about the CIA’s meddling in domestic affairs. He wrote in The Washington Post: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”

Then as now, however, The Washington Post was an arm of the deep state and the editor buried Truman’s op-ed on Page A11. The CIA was outraged enough by the column, however, that CIA director Allen Dulles lied and claimed that Truman had been “quite astounded“ when he saw his own article and that the whole thing was really the work of a Truman aide.

This bizarre attempt by CIA operative to “retract” Truman’s article was nonetheless contradicted by Truman himself who reiterated in a 1964 letter that Truman had only intended the CIA to be an informational service for the president, and that “[I]t was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.” Truman would later tell an interviewer that “[I]f I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have [created the CIA.]”1

Of course, Truman may have known about many of the CIA’s “strange activities” by the late 1950s, such as MKULTRA, and related “mind control” experiments with LSD and other drugs. The CIA was known to drug the agency’s victims against their will, such as seven black inmates in Kentucky who were were fed “’double, triple and quadruple’ doses of LSD for 77 straight days.” One might also mention the very suspicious case of Frank Olson, a bioweapons expert who was given LSD by CIA agents without his knowledge. Olson later “fell” to his death from a hotel window in 1953. The agency lied about drugging Olson for 22 years.

The CIA faced some scrutiny in the wake of the Vietnam war as the Left began to rein in the deep state which had spent years attempting to destroy American opponents of the war through a variety of dirty tricks. Yet, the agency had hardly been “reformed” by the time the US’s “war on terror” was launched in late 2001. The CIA returned to its illegal medical torture—assuming it had ever stopped—with new medical experiments on regime prisoners. Documents uncovered by the ACLU have shown that CIA doctors are still used to provide a veneer of scientific legitimacy to CIA torture programs. In the age of vaccine passports, this alliance between doctors and the CIA should alarm any defender of human rights.

In spite of all this, the CIA continues to fail spectacularly at its original mission of collecting useful information. The CIA failed to see the Iranian Revolution coming. The CIA was clueless about Soviet Missiles shipped to Cuba in 1962. The CIA believed the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse in the 1980s. And, of course, the CIA let 9/11 happen right under its nose.

Given all this, even conservative stalwarts have seen the light on the CIA in recent years. The late Angelo Codevilla, for example, penned a 2020 article calling for “breaking up” the CIA. The CIA, Codevilla notes, is now so “ideologically partisan,” so “obsolete,” and its record of failure so undeniable, that the agency is now “inherently dangerous and low-value.”

End the FBI

The CIA isn’t alone in its war on American freedom and decency, however. The FBI is almost equally dangerous, which is why Codevilla also calls for the FBI to be “restricted to law enforcement.”

Unknown to many Americans, the FBI doesn’t even consider itself to be a law enforcement agency anymore. The FBI is now a “national security” agency, and that means the FBI is an arm of the American spy regime. This, of course, is why the Department of Justice can now be used for blatantly political purposes such as when the FBI spied on candidate Donald Trump in 2016.

Here at mises.org, we’ve already reported on the mixture of abuse and incompetence that characterizes the FBI. The FBI expends countless hours tracking down harmless “enemies” of the regime—such as little old ladies prosecuted for the January 6 riot—while ignoring real criminals like Larry Nassar. Nor surprisingly, local police will tell you it’s the state and local police who do the real work of tracking down real criminals, and then the FBI swoops in to take the credit.

Moreover, the history of the FBI lends substantial plausibility to Tucker Carlson’s claim that intelligence agencies are in the business of blackmailing members of Congress. This is a known tactic employed by J. Edgar Hoover during this 48-year reign at the FBI. Hoover, of course, was lauded for decades as a hero, but in reality, he was, in the words of historian Beverly Gage, a “one-dimensional tyrant and backroom schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission…the most influential federal appointee of the twentieth century.” Hoover and his army of compliant FBI agents spied on anyone and everyone—especially elected officials and other public figures—who might be useful as a target for blackmail.

So, what to do with these agencies?

There is nothing that these agencies do that could justify their continued existence. Both agencies—neither of which in their present forms are authorized among the enumerated powers of the US constitution—were sold to the taxpayers as agencies to be used only against hardened criminals and foreign dictators. Today, these organizations spend their time exploiting the taxpayers for ever larger budgets, for ever more power to spy on Americans, and new ways to trick those same Americans into supporting the regime’s latest wars.

They are, simply put, the regime’s secret police, devoted to building the regime’s power. One answer is to eviscerate their budgets, repeal their enabling legislation, and encourage aggressive lawfare against the regime in retribution for these agencies’ many crimes. That’s probably a best-case scenario. Other scenarios likely require the bankruptcy of the regime, or perhaps its dissolution. That is likely to come with substantial and negative economic effects in the short term. Unfortunately, many Americans are still enthralled to these organizations thanks to relentless state propaganda that tells us this American version of the KGB exists for our own good.  Abolition will clearly take time. Now is a good time to start.

  • 1Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1973) pp. 391-92. When asked how he felt about the creation of the CIA, Truman replied: “I think it was a mistake. And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it … it got out of hand …they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways … those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret … That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.”

from:    https://mises.org/mises-wire/fbi-and-cia-are-enemies-american-people

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Who Voted?

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Bombshell: 1-in-5 2020 Mail-in Ballots Were Fraudulent, Survey Shows

by Jamie White

April 27th 2024, 11:04 am

Tucker Carlson explains how self-reporting survey found nearly 20% of respondents admitted committing some form of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

About 20% of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election were fraudulent, which effectively handed the presidency to Joe Biden, Tucker Carlson reported Friday.

Carlson broke down a survey conducted by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen which found that approximately 1 in 5 of those polled admitted they committed some form of election fraud in the 2020 election.

The Heartland Institute’s Justin Haskins broke down the survey which asked voters in a roundabout way whether they committed some form of voter fraud.

“We asked people a series of questions, one of the first questions was ‘did you vote in the 2020, and did you vote with an absentee ballot?’ And if they answered yes to both of those questions, then we asked a bunch of questions related to voter fraud. We didn’t tell them that we were asking, ‘did you commit voter fraud?’ We just asked them about various behaviors,” Haskins explained.

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“For example, we asked people, ‘did you vote in a state where you’re no longer a legal resident?’ That’s a pretty straightforward question. If you’re not a permanent resident of a state, you can’t vote there. 17% of people, nearly one in five, said yes they did do that.”

“We asked people, ‘did you fill out a ballot for someone else on their behalf?’ That’s also illegal,” he continued. “You’re not allowed to fill out someone else’s ballot. 21% of people said yes to that question.”

“We asked if people forged the signature of a friend or family member on their behalf with or without their permission. We actually put that in the poll question. And 17% of people said yes to that.”

“So all told, it’s at least — and I say at least — 1 in 5 mail-in ballots involved some sort of fraudulent activity,” Haskins added.

To top it off, 10% of those surveyed said they personally know somebody who admitted they committed one of these forms of voter fraud.

Over 43% of 2020 voters cast ballots by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history, according to election data, and the majority of mail-in ballot voters supported Biden.

Without mail-in ballot fraud, the Heartland Institute concluded Trump would have won 311 electoral votes to Biden’s 227.

from:    https://www.infowars.com/posts/bombshell-1-in-5-2020-mail-in-ballots-were-fraudulent-survey-shows/

The Perps Behind the Crocus City Hall -A Discussion

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Bombshell. Who Was Behind the Crocus City Hall Terrorists? Statement by Alexander Bortnikov, Director of Russia’s FSB

By Dr. Gilbert Doctorow
Global Research, March 28, 2024

To the uninitiated, I explain first that the FSB is the successor organization to the Soviet Union’s well-known and much feared KGB.  However, the FSB today might be better compared with the FBI in the United States. It deals with domestic criminality of all kinds and with threats to Russian civilians such as terrorism. The agency and its head are rarely in the news.

In this respect, the FSB is less visible both at home and abroad than the Foreign Intelligence Service headed by Sergei Naryshkin, a state figure who spent five years of this millennium as chairman of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of the legislature, and also three years as head of the Presidential Administration. In both positions Naryshkin was very often seen on television performing his duties.

By contrast, Bortnikov spent the past 15 years in his FSB offices out of sight. However, the spectacular attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue has propelled him to center stage and yesterday he met with the Russian state television journalist Pavel Zarubin for an interview and then allowed himself to be questioned further by a gaggle of other journalists on his way out along a corridor. This spontaneous Q&A was later broadcast on the television news. What Bortnikov had to say was extraordinary and bears directly on whether you and I should now be looking for bomb shelters. Regrettably you will not find any of it in the lead stories of today’s mainstream media. The Financial Times, for example, features an account of Xi’s meeting with CEOs of American businesses to mend ties: interesting, but not very relevant if we are at the cusp of WWIII.

Bortnikov is by definition a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle of advisors. He, Putin and Naryshkin are all roughly the same age. At 72, Bortnikov is just several years older.

I was struck in particular by his poise and prudent, carefully weighed choice of words while setting out where the investigation is heading with transparency and a ‘let the chips fall where they may’ unaffected demeanor.

The journalists were all probing the question of who stood behind the terror attack. Bortnikov told them…and us: standing behind the terror act committed by Islamist extremists are the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine.

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Russian Crocus City Hall amphitheater interiors, day after terrorist attack on 22 March 2024 (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

Bortnikov said that the preliminary findings indicate that the four perpetrators of the slaughter were headed by car to the border with Ukraine where they were awaited on the other side.

He very calmly explained that the involvement of foreign powers is being clarified and that he will say nothing out of pure emotion now but will wait for the facts to be solidly collected before being presented.

Nonetheless, it was entirely newsworthy that he named the United States, Great Britain and Ukraine as the likely puppet masters of the terror act. Let us remember that following the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the most significant attack on critical civilian infrastructure globally in the last 50 years, Russian officials did not point the finger directly at any country. There was innuendo but no direct accusations such as we heard from Bortnikov yesterday.

*Meanwhile, quite apart from Mr. Bortnikov’s chat with journalists, a lot of new elements to the terror attack at Crocus City Hall were posted yesterday on the Russian state television news and analysis program Sixty Minutes.

In particular, we learned that in the last days of February and first couple of days of March two of the four attackers were in Istanbul. The departure and arrival of one at a Moscow airport was recorded on video. We were told which hotels they stayed in, and the selfies and other photos taken by one in Istanbul were put up on the screen. It is still not clear with whom they met in Turkey. However, the timing itself is very important, because the point was made that they returned to Moscow to carry out a terror attack on 8 March, International Women’s Day, a sacred date on the Russian calendar. Had they done so on that day, the effect would have been catastrophic for the presidential elections in Russia one week later.

However, per Sixty Minutes, it was determined that Russian state security on 8 March was too tight for the terrorist mission to succeed and the United States decided to pull the plug on that operation. Note that this is approximately the time when Victoria Nuland tendered her resignation at the State Department (5 March).  The possible causal link here surely deserves attention by my peers in the U.S. ‘dissident’ community.

In any case, the scenario which was explored later in the day on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show is that the Ukrainians decided to proceed with the terror attack a week after the Russian presidential elections, when it lost most of its rationale.  They did so over the objections of Washington.

*From time to time, readers ask why I pay attention to talk shows like Vladimir Solovyov’s.  These skeptics tend to ignore that Solovyov invites not just the usual irresponsible academics and journalists who can amuse the public but also some very serious statesmen who are close to the center of power in Russia and exert influence on the conduct of foreign and domestic policy, including in particular committee chairmen and other key personalities from the State Duma.

So it was last night when we heard from a member of the Committee on Relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States (Former Soviet Union). With reference to the never ending terror attacks on civilians in the Russian border region of Belgorod coming from nearby Kharkiv (Ukraine), he said it is time to raze Kharkov to the ground: issue a warning to the population to get in their cars and head West, then blow it all to bits.  Kharkiv is, by the way, Ukraine’s second most populous city after Kiev.

In general, the mood of panelists and of the host Solovyov himself is now changing in a cardinal manner: Ukraine is seen as an enemy state and the sooner it is finished off the better. There was talk last night on the need for missile strikes to flatten the presidential palace in Kiev along with all military and other decision making government centers in the capital.

As we have observed repeatedly over the past two years. President Putin has been a voice for moderation and restraint, resisting actions that might precipitate WWIII.  That is clearly coming to an end when his own FSB director names the United States and the UK as planners of the biggest terror attack in Russia in 20 years.

from:    https://www.globalresearch.ca/yesterday-remarkable-statements-journalists-alexander-bortnikov-director-russia-federal-security-service/5853370?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

WHo is Knocking on Your Door?

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REPORT: FBI Agents Captured on Video During Home Visit Admit They Spend ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Interrogating Americans About Their Social Media Posts

By  
Screenshot: Rolla Abdeljawad/Facebook

FBI agents have been recorded during a home visit to a Stillwater resident, admitting that scrutinizing Americans over their social media activities is a daily operation, Reason.com has confirmed.

Rolla Abdeljawad, an Oklahoma resident, encountered three FBI agents at her doorstep, inquiring about her Facebook posts.

Abdeljawad’s lawyer, Hassan Shibly, took to social media to post a video of the interaction. The video, which surfaced online on Wednesday, portrays a tense exchange.

In the video, Abdeljawad declines to speak with the agents and requests that they show their badges on camera, a request the agents did not fulfill. Abdeljawad later verified with local police that the individuals were indeed FBI agents.

Screenshot: Rolla Abdeljawad/Facebook

“Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account,” one agent, donned in a gray shirt, informed Abdeljawad.

Challenging the agents, Abdeljawad questioned the principles of free speech, to which a second agent, clothed in a red shirt, responded reassuringly yet revealed the frequency of such interrogations.

“No, we totally do. That’s why we’re not here to arrest you or anything. We do this every day, all day long. It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will.”

Shibly expressed his concern, noting that this was the first instance he was aware of where Facebook’s parent company, Meta, might have preemptively reported posts to law enforcement.

The specific posts that drew the FBI’s attention are not clear, but Abdeljawad has recently expressed strong views on the conflict in Gaza, including inflammatory statements against Israel.

Abdeljawad’s Facebook timeline, which is public, has been filled with posts expressing her frustration with the situation in Gaza, using harsh language against Israel. Despite the nature of her posts, none explicitly called for violence.

Screenshot: Rolla Abdeljawad/Facebook

Shibly wrote on Twitter:

WATCH: FBI visit the home of an American Muslim Woman’s home to question her about her pro-Palestine social media posts after they were flagged by Meta’s Facebook!

What she did right:
1. Refuse to speak to them without a lawyer.
2. Refuse to let them in her house.
3. Record the interaction.

What she did wrong:
1. Exit her house. Do not let them in your house if they do not have a warrant but do not exit your house either.

You have the right never to speak to the FBI without a lawyer.

If the FBI contact you contact us at http://MuslimLegal.com for help.

WATCH:

 

Following the visit, Abdeljawad took to Facebook to suggest that the approach by the FBI seemed more like a “fishing expedition” than a specific investigation. She emphasized her role as a Muslim to protect creation and stand for what she believes is right.

“Rather, it seems like a fishing expedition,” she wrote. “I do not fear them. My only concern as, I told the cop is that, someone in my state will do something or that they would and then use my posts in a malicious attempt to ‘smear’ me. Just *remember, I am a Muslim, an obligated protector of creation. I enjoin what is good and forbid what is wrong,” Abdeljawad wrote.

In a statement to Fox News and Reason, FBI’s Oklahoma City office spokeswoman, Kayla McCleery, asserted the FBI’s commitment to protecting Americans and upholding the Constitution, clarifying that investigations do not stem solely from First Amendment-protected activities.

“Every day, the FBI engages with members of the public in furtherance of our mission, which is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. We can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity. The FBI is committed to ensuring our activities are conducted with a valid law enforcement or national security purpose, and uphold the constitutional rights of all Americans.”

Meta’s policy allows for data to be shared with U.S. law enforcement under specific legal circumstances.

“Meta responds to government requests for data in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service. Each and every request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency and we may reject or require greater specificity on requests that appear overly broad or vague. The charts below provide data on the number of requests we received, the number of users/accounts requested, and the rate we complied with all or some of the government’s request,” according to its website.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that a leading opponent of the new China-owned corn mill in North Dakota received a home visit from local police and FBI agents after posting a paragraph from the Declaration of Independence on Facebook.

Here is what Jodi Carlson posted on Facebook that warranted a visit by the Stasi FBI.

“We have petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Depotism (oppressive absolute power), it is our right, OUR DUTY, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future Security.” (The word “their” (the people) replaced with “our”).”

On Friday, The Gateway Pundit also reported that the FBI visited a woman on February 22 and her family in Louisiana who had used social media to expose a man who allegedly ‘dumped her cousin’s body like trash’ and was released on probation.

“Basically the tweet about my cousins killer went viral. 8.3 million views. Elon Musk even put a ! Under it. The FBI agent went to my family in Louisiana. My family thought they were there to help since the monster only got probation after all he’s done. They were there about my tweet,” Kristin Martin told The Gateway Pundit.

“They wanted to see if I or anyone they know could have sent in a threat to judges. That was exactly the same reason they gave me for coming to my house,” she added.

from:    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/report-fbi-agents-captured-video-during-home-visit/

Holding Victims Responsible for Crimes of Others

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Tough on the VICTIMS of crime: St Louis Democrat mayor blames convenience store owners for crimes that happen on their property and vows to hold them ‘accountable’ for lawbreaking

  • St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones told the Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime she plans to make convenience store owners more responsible for crimes on or near their properties 
  • The plans are inspired by those used in Atlanta, Georgia that makes nightclub owners more liable for crimes on their premises 
  • It comes as the city grapples with a spate of high profile attacks, including the assault on fifteen-year-old Kaylee Gain earlier this month.  

By ALICE WRIGHT FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: | UPDATED: 

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has announced new plans to make convenience store owners more responsible for the crimes committed on or outside their property.

Mayor Jones, St Louis’ the first black female mayor, told leaders at the the Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime in Memphis that St Louis needs to combat violent crime and theft around convenience stores.

‘We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,’ Mayor Jones said on Thursday.

‘So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime?’ she asked.

Adding: ‘Some of the things we’re already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.’

Jones, who has been mayor since 2021, told the other Mayor’s ideas, the details of which are not yet clear, will be adopted from laws in Atlanta, Georgia that make nightclub owners more liable for crimes on or near their property.

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has announced new plans to make convenience store owners more responsible for the crimes committed on or outside their property

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St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has announced new plans to make convenience store owners more responsible for the crimes committed on or outside their property

'We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,' Mayor Jones told the Black Mayors' Coalition on Crime on Thursday

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‘We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,’ Mayor Jones told the Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime on Thursday

Robberies at Webster Groves gas station are possibly connected to others in metro, according to local police

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Robberies at Webster Groves gas station are possibly connected to others in metro, according to local police

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In January a woman was shot dead in a Jennings convenience store after a struggle ensued, local news reported.

Earlier this month a man was shot at a QuikTrip store in south St. Louis, according to reports.

The suspect was shot dead and the store’s security guard was shot in the thigh in a struggle for his gun, according to local reports.

Attacks have also focused on gas stations, such as the Webster Groves gas station that police have raised as potentially connected to other violent robberies.

In 2023, St. Louis was ranked the third most dangerous city again behind Detroit and Michigan but also Baltimore.

‘The prevalence of firearms, coupled with limited gun control measures, further contributes to the overall crime rates in St. Louis,’ real estate Norada wrote of the city.

It comes after a spate of violent attacks in the city, including the recent attack on fifteen-year-old Kaylee Gain earlier this month.

Kaylee Gain's high school has refused to hand over records to the Missouri Attorney General after a vicious school fight left her fighting for her lifeIt comes after a spate of violent attacks in the city, including the recent attack on fifteen-year-old Kaylee Gain earlier this month.

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Kaylee Gain’s high school has refused to hand over records to the Missouri Attorney General after a vicious school fight left her fighting for her lifeIt comes after a spate of violent attacks in the city, including the recent attack on fifteen-year-old Kaylee Gain earlier this month.

Missouri AG blames ‘radical DEI programs’ for Kaylee Gain attack

Gain was attacked on March 8 by another teenage girl who slammed her head into the pavement.

The teen was left with a fractured skull, brain bleeding, brain swelling, and in a coma for two weeks following the attack.

Despite its high crime rate, stats did drop significantly in 2023 compared to the year before.

Shootings were down 24 percent from 2022, felony thefts were down 39 percent and shootings involving juveniles were down 47 percent, according to St Louis police.

The city also saw a drop of more than 40 homicides bringing killings to their lowest levels in more than a decade.

from:    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13253823/St-Louis-Mayor-Tishaura-Jones-blames-store-owners-crimes.html

So, Who isCasting Your Vote???

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Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide

From Bangladesh to Slovakia, AI-generated deepfakes have been undermining elections around the globe. Experts say their reach and sophistication is a sign of things to come in consequential elections later this year. (March 15)
BY ALI SWENSON AND KELVIN CHAN
Updated 12:46 AM MST, March 14, 2024

LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.

It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.

Experts warn AI and deepfakes will likely be worse in the coming elections.
Here’s how governments and organizations are responding to the threat.

AI-powered misinformation and disinformation is emerging as a risk as people in a slew of countries head to the polls. Read more on the 25 elections in 2024 that could change the world, and take a look at more of the AP’s global elections coverage.

A wave of AI deepfakes tied to elections in Europe and Asia has coursed through social media for months, serving as a warning for more than 50 countries heading to the polls this year.

“You don’t need to look far to see some people … being clearly confused as to whether something is real or not,” said Henry Ajder, a leading expert in generative AI based in Cambridge, England.

The question is no longer whether AI deepfakes could affect elections, but how influential they will be, said Ajder, who runs a consulting firm called Latent Space Advisory.

As the U.S. presidential race heats up, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about the growing threat, saying generative AI makes it easy for “foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence.”

People are reflected in a window of a hotel at the Davos Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
People are reflected in a window of a hotel at the Davos Promenade in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

With AI deepfakes, a candidate’s image can be smeared, or softened. Voters can be steered toward or away from candidates — or even to avoid the polls altogether. But perhaps the greatest threat to democracy, experts say, is that a surge of AI deepfakes could erode the public’s trust in what they see and hear.

Some recent examples of AI deepfakes include:

— A video of Moldova’s pro-Western president throwing her support behind a political party friendly to Russia.

— Audio clips of Slovakia’s liberal party leader discussing vote rigging and raising the price of beer.

— A video of an opposition lawmaker in Bangladesh — a conservative Muslim majority nation — wearing a bikini.

 

The novelty and sophistication of the technology makes it hard to track who is behind AI deepfakes. Experts say governments and companies are not yet capable of stopping the deluge, nor are they moving fast enough to solve the problem.

As the technology improves, “definitive answers about a lot of the fake content are going to be hard to come by,” Ajder said.

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Here’s what you need to know about the world’s largest democratic election kicking off in India
Security vehicles escort a police van carrying Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Admi Party, or Common Man's Party, to Tihar prison from a local court, in New Delhi, India, Monday, April 1, 2024. A court in India on Monday placed a top opposition leader in two weeks of judicial detention after his 10 days in the custody of a federal agency expired, in a case that opposition parties say is part of a crackdown by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on rivals ahead of a national election later this month. (AP Photo/Dinesh Joshi)
An Indian court sends a top opposition leader to jail until shortly before election

ERODING TRUST

Some AI deepfakes aim to sow doubt about candidates’ allegiances.

In Moldova, an Eastern European country bordering Ukraine, pro-Western President Maia Sandu has been a frequent target. One AI deepfake that circulated shortly before local elections depicted her endorsing a Russian-friendly party and announcing plans to resign.

FILE - Moldova's President Maia Sandu, right, greets Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Bulboaca, Moldova, June 1, 2023. She has been a frequent target of online disinformation created with artificial intelligence. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)
Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, right, greets Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Bulboaca, Moldova, June 1, 2023.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)

Officials in Moldova believe the Russian government is behind the activity. With presidential elections this year, the deepfakes aim “to erode trust in our electoral process, candidates and institutions — but also to erode trust between people,” said Olga Rosca, an adviser to Sandu. The Russian government declined to comment for this story.

China has also been accused of weaponizing generative AI for political purposes.

In Taiwan, a self-ruled island that China claims as its own, an AI deepfake gained attention earlier this year by stirring concerns about U.S. interference in local politics.

The fake clip circulating on TikTok showed U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, vice chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, promising stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan if the incumbent party’s candidates were elected in January.

FILE - Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., questions witnesses during a congressional hearing, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington. A fake clip circulating on TikTok showed Wittman, vice chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, promising stronger U.S. military support for Taiwan if the incumbent party's candidates were elected in January, 2024. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., questions witnesses during a congressional hearing, on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Wittman blamed the Chinese Communist Party for trying to meddle in Taiwanese politics, saying it uses TikTok — a Chinese-owned company — to spread “propaganda.”

A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, Wang Wenbin, said his government doesn’t comment on fake videos and that it opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The Taiwan election, he stressed, “is a local affair of China.”

BLURRING REALITY

Audio-only deepfakes are especially hard to verify because, unlike photos and videos, they lack telltale signs of manipulated content.

In Slovakia, another country overshadowed by Russian influence, audio clips resembling the voice of the liberal party chief were shared widely on social media just days before parliamentary elections. The clips purportedly captured him talking about hiking beer prices and rigging the vote.

It’s understandable that voters might fall for the deception, Ajder said, because humans are “much more used to judging with our eyes than with our ears.”

In the U.S., robocalls impersonating U.S. President Joe Biden urged voters in New Hampshire to abstain from voting in January’s primary election. The calls were later traced to a political consultant who said he was trying to publicize the dangers of AI deepfakes.

FILE - Paul Carpenter describes AI software during an interview in New Orleans, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. Carpenter says he was hired in January to use AI software to imitate President Joe Biden's voice to convince New Hampshire Democrat voters not to vote in the state's presidential primary. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
Paul Carpenter describes AI software during an interview in New Orleans, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. Carpenter says he was hired in January to use AI software to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice to convince New Hampshire Democrat voters not to vote in the state’s presidential primary. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File)

In poorer countries, where media literacy lags, even low-quality AI fakes can be effective.

Such was the case last year in Bangladesh, where opposition lawmaker Rumeen Farhana — a vocal critic of the ruling party — was falsely depicted wearing a bikini. The viral video sparked outrage in the conservative, majority-Muslim nation.

“They trust whatever they see on Facebook,” Farhana said.

Rumeen Farhana, a politician from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) sits for a photograph during an interview at her residence in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. Farhana, a vocal critic of the ruling party, was falsely depicted wearing a bikini in a video created using artificial intelligence. The viral video sparked outrage in the conservative, majority-Muslim nation. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)
Rumeen Farhana, a politician from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) sits for a photograph during an interview at her residence in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)

Experts are particularly concerned about upcoming elections in India, the world’s largest democracy and where social media platforms are breeding grounds for disinformation.

A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY

Some political campaigns are using generative AI to bolster their candidate’s image.

In Indonesia, the team that ran the presidential campaign of Prabowo Subianto deployed a simple mobile app to build a deeper connection with supporters across the vast island nation. The app enabled voters to upload photos and make AI-generated images of themselves with Subianto.

As the types of AI deepfakes multiply, authorities around the world are scrambling to come up with guardrails.

Noudhy Valdryno, the digital coordinator for the campaign team of Indonesian presidential frontrunner Prabowo Subianto, shows the interface of a web application that allows supporters to upload photos to make AI-generated images of them with Subianto, in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Noudhy Valdryno, the digital coordinator for the campaign team of Indonesian presidential frontrunner Prabowo Subianto, shows the interface of a web application that allows supporters to upload photos to make AI-generated images of them with Subianto, in Jakarta, Indonesia, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

The European Union already requires social media platforms to cut the risk of spreading disinformation or “election manipulation.” It will mandate special labeling of AI deepfakes starting next year, too late for the EU’s parliamentary elections in June. Still, the rest of the world is a lot further behind.

The world’s biggest tech companies recently — and voluntarily — signed a pact to prevent AI tools from disrupting elections. For example, the company that owns Instagram and Facebook has said it will start labeling deepfakes that appear on its platforms.

But deepfakes are harder to rein in on apps like the Telegram chat service, which did not sign the voluntary pact and uses encrypted chats that can be difficult to monitor.

Some experts worry that efforts to rein in AI deepfakes could have unintended consequences.

An advertising banner with a slogan about AI is fixed at a building at the Davos Promenade, alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
An advertising banner with a slogan about AI is fixed at a building at the Davos Promenade, alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

Well-meaning governments or companies might trample on the sometimes “very thin” line between political commentary and an “illegitimate attempt to smear a candidate,” said Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

Major generative AI services have rules to limit political disinformation. But experts say it remains too easy to outwit the platforms’ restrictions or use alternative services that don’t have the same safeguards.

Even without bad intentions, the rising use of AI is problematic. Many popular AI-powered chatbots are still spitting out false and misleading information that threatens to disenfranchise voters.

And software isn’t the only threat. Candidates could try to deceive voters by claiming that real events portraying them in an unfavorable light were manufactured by AI.

“A world in which everything is suspect — and so everyone gets to choose what they believe — is also a world that’s really challenging for a flourishing democracy,” said Lisa Reppell, a researcher at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in Arlington, Virginia.

Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writers Julhas Alam in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Krutika Pathi in New Delhi, Huizhong Wu in Bangkok, Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dake Kang in Beijing, and Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania, contributed to this report.

from:    https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-elections-disinformation-chatgpt-bc283e7426402f0b4baa7df280a4c3fd

 

The First Amendment – Isn’t Thaty Its Purpose, Ketanji?????

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Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Concerned’ First Amendment Is ‘Hamstringing’ Government from Censorship

March 20, 2024 IJR and Washington Examiner 4

Justice Jackson said to the plaintiff, “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” She added, “You seem to be suggesting that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So, can you help me? Because I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances, from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”

 

Commentator Charlie Kirk wrote: You CANNOT outsource censorship and call it constitutional. You CANNOT have the FBI harassing Facebook and not call it coercion. You CANNOT suspend the Constitution because you say COVID is a once in a lifetime event.

.

.

Summary by JW Williams

The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed suit in May 2022 against President Joe Biden and others alleging they were using the federal government’s power to suppress free speech on social media platforms during the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. The case, Murthy v. Missouri, is now being heard by the the Supreme Court .

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to be perturbed that the government could not censor social media posts in “the most important time periods.” Here are some examples of government interference in free speech on social media that were taken from a ruling from a judge in Louisiana:

  1.  Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform.
  2. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts.
  3. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation.

Justice Jackson said to the Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga:

“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.’ She added, “You seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So, can you help me? Because I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances, from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”

Aguiñaga responded that his view was that the government should intervene in certain situations, but it has to do so by following the First Amendment.

Jackson said a “once-in-a-lifetime pandemic” or other emergencies would provide grounds for the government to censor social media posts that are misinformative.

Conservative Justice Alito said that “The government is treating social media platforms like their subordinates.”

Commentator Charlie Kirk wrote: You CANNOT outsource censorship and call it constitutional. You CANNOT have the FBI harassing Facebook and not call it coercion. You CANNOT suspend the Constitution because you say COVID is a once in a lifetime event.

Sources…

IJR:      https://ijr.com/justice-jackson-tells-gop-officials-view-first-amendment-hamstringing-government/

Washington Examiner:        https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/2926698/ketanji-brown-jackson-concerned-first-amendment-is-hamstringing-government-from-censorship

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2024/03/ketanji-brown-jackson-concerned-first-amendment-is-hamstringing-government-from-censorship/

Trust “The Science” — What “Science”?

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Top Harvard Cancer Researchers Accused of Scientific Fraud, 37 Studies Affected

January 31, 2024 Information Liberation, ARS Technica and NY Post

Boston: Several top researchers from the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, were accused of manipulating image data (pictures of Western blots) with simple copy-and-past techniques. It is unknown how these manipulations change the outcome of the studies. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has already initiated six retractions to papers and 31 others are in the process of being corrected.

Sholto David, the man who discovered the manipulations, said, “”[W]e only see the tiny tip of the fraud iceberg – image data duplications, the last resort of a failed scientist after every other trick failed to provide the desired result, Billions of dollars were burned for this cancerous trash science, but it made many academic careers, some got very rich, and entire dynasties established themselves at Dana Farber.”

David said on his website that such fraud explains “why the progress in cancer research is so slow despite billions being invested into basic research.”

.Top Harvard cancer researchers, including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, are being accused of faking data and committing scientific fraud.

From Ars Technica, “Top Harvard cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud; 37 studies affected”:

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

The accusations come from [British molecular biologist] data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture. DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is “committed to a culture of accountability and integrity,” and that “every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully.”

The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson.

David said on his website that such fraud explains “why the progress in cancer research is so slow despite billions being invested into basic research.”

David shared dozens of pictures like the one above showing dozens of researchers allegedly copy/pasting and faking their data.

“[W]e only see the tiny tip of the fraud iceberg – image data duplications, the last resort of a failed scientist after every other trick failed to provide the desired result,” David said. “Billions of dollars were burned for this cancerous trash science, but it made many academic careers, some got very rich, and entire dynasties established themselves at Dana Farber.”

Read full article here…

ARS Technica:        https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-researchers-accused-of-scientific-fraud-37-studies-affected/

NY Post:        https://nypost.com/2024/01/22/news/harvard-teaching-hospital-to-retract-papers-by-top-researchers/

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2024/01/top-harvard-cancer-researchers-accused-of-scientific-fraud-37-studies-affected/