Tag Archives: censorship

What You Say Might Just Get You

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Grants Reveal Feds’ Horrific Plans To Censor Americans’ Speech

IMAGE CREDIT U.S. ARMY / FLICKR / CC BY 2.0, CROPPED

POSTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND MARCH 24, 2023

The founding fathers should have included extra text in the First Amendment: “Congress shall not make any law, Executive shall not make any rule or order, Judiciary shall make no ruling” abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceable  assembly and right to protest the government for redress of our grievances.There is indisputable evidence that our own government is the driving vehicle to completely obliterate free speech in America. The Congress can rein in the Administration but unfortunately, many in Congress are complicit and even encouraging Biden and staff to intensify the attack.

The current trajectory of this war on the First Amendment will result in criminalizing speech, imposing penalties like fines, court cases and imprisonment. ⁃ TN Editor

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

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

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

AI and ML Technology Will Monitor Everything We Say and Read

The federal government has awarded more than 500-plus contracts or grants related to “misinformation” or “disinformation” since 2020. One predominant area of research pushed by the Department of Defense involves the use of AI and ML technology to monitor or listen to internet “conversations.”

Originally used as a marketing tool for businesses to track discussions about their brands and products and to track competitors, the DOD and other federal agencies are now paying for-profit public relations and communications firms to convert their technology into tools for the government to monitor speech on the internet.

The areas of the internet the companies monitor differ somewhat, and each business offers its own unique AI and ML proprietary technology, but the underlying approach and goals remain identical: The technology under development will “mine” large portions of the internet and identify conversations deemed indicative of an emerging harmful narrative, to allow the government to track those “threats” and adopt countermeasures before the messages go viral.

With AI and ML identifying in real-time the origins of supposed influence operations and how the messages spread, the government will have the ability to preempt the amplification of the speech, squelching even true reporting before the general populace has an opportunity to learn the news. To appreciate fully the danger this poses to free speech requires Americans to consider the use of that technology with these seven additional details.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once

First, the AI and ML technology under development will mine every conceivable mode of conversation for the government. Consider, for example, the databases monitored by just a few of the companies the government is paying to develop this AI and ML technology.

PeakMetrics, the recipient of a $1.5 million award, tracks millions of news sites, blogs, global social platforms, podcasts, TV and radio, and email newsletters.

Omelas Inc., which received more than $1 million in taxpayer money, culls data from “the most influential newspapers, TV channels, government offices, militant groups, and more across a dozen social networks and messaging apps, thousands of websites, and thousands of RSS feeds.”

Alethea Group, which received a Phase I award of nearly $50,000 to develop a “machine learning tool for proactive disinformation/misinformation detection, assessment, and mitigation,” boasts it covers data sources including mainstream and “fringe” social media platforms, peer-to-peer messaging platforms, blogs and forums, state-affiliated media sites, “gray” propaganda sites, and the dark web.

Newsguard, awarded $750,000 by the DOD, offers two databases, including its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes.

Primer, which scored a $3 million award to develop its technology, offers a database that looks to news and media data sources, publicly captured images, the dark web, cyberattacks shared by the general public, and classified—presumably for government clients—and unclassified data sources. Primer also partners with Flashpoint, which adds “Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and “the deep and dark web” to the databases mined.

2. We’re Talking Americans, Not Just Russian Bots

It is also important to recognize that the AI and ML technology under development will not just mine foreign or state-connected actors, but will monitor everyone’s speech. Both the government grants and the web pages of the monitoring companies confirm this reality.

We also know from the “Twitter Files” that the government and its fellow residents in the Censorship-Industrial Complex view the speech of Americans as related to foreign influence operations merely because the viewpoint matches what they claim is an adversary’s perspective. And we know the government pushed for the censorship of ordinary Americans.

By its nature, AI and ML technology has unlimited potential to flag problematic speech on any imaginable subject. Here, the past is prologue: Speech need not involve terrorism, acts of war, or even our electoral process for our government to consider it within its purview to fact-check. (It also need not be false; see point 4).

The “Twitter Files” and recent events provide Americans a glimpse into the breadth of the topics the government may deem harmful narratives worthy of censor—from elections, to vaccines, to runs on grocery stores. Underlying the government’s obsession with silencing misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information is the “Great Power Competition” perspective of foreign relations, under which China and Russia represent a constant threat to America’s power, influences, and interests.

With the government viewing foreign relations through the Great Power Competition paradigm, speech on any topic, touching even tangentially on America’s “power, influences, and interests,” will be fair game for censorship efforts.

3. The Great Power Competition Renders Everything Fair Game for Censorship

While to convincingly prove this reality requires a deeper exposé—coming soon—on the Great Power Competition’s connection to the government’s focus on misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, last week Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, showcased the current thinking inspiring our leaders. During a conference call with the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, Kelly asked whether there was “a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks.”

Kelly’s question was “couched” “in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this,” Rep. Thomas Massie told Public, but, according to Massie, Kelly “didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue.”

The move from the censorship of terrorism to the silencing of supposed interference in elections to censoring posts about “bank runs” follows naturally from the shift in foreign relations paradigms from the War on Terror to the Great Powers Competition. The latter views anything affecting American power or influence as fair game. We also saw this shift with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) proposal to consider “financial misinformation” within its purview.

The government’s censorship efforts won’t stop at supposed “financial misinformation,” however, because anything and everything journalists report and citizens discuss affects America’s “power, influence, and interest.” So, the government’s development of technology to monitor the entirety of the internet foretells a much more dangerous threat than apparent on the surface.

4. The Government Brands True Speech Misinformation

The threat to free speech stemming from the government’s monitoring of the internet is further increased by our overlords’ willingness to brand true speech “misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information” and then seek to censor it. The “Twitter Files” also exposed this reality, with our government and its lackeys seeking the censorship of true facts that might lead to “vaccine hesitancy” or reveal runs on grocery stores.

That our government would seek to silence true speech on such matters gives Americans reason to fear further censorship of true information.

5. Faulty Analysis and Biased Censors

The “Twitter Files” also revealed that censorship demands by the government, think tanks, and academic institutions relied on faulty misinformation analyses, including ones that identified innocent Americans as foreign actors. Also, many of those involved in the disinformation industry maintain left-leaning bias and a penchant for targeting conservatives.

In furthering its plans to monitor the internet for supposedly harmful narratives to silence, the government is continuing to work with biased groups, including ones that pushed faulty analyses, adding to the threat to free speech.

6. The Government’s Partners Are Poised to Censor

The government’s push to develop AI and ML technology to mine the internet is even more terrifying knowing that a Censorship Complex has already been built. The “Twitter Files” revealed the breadth and depth of the complex, with every alphabet-soup federal agency working with the social media giants and an array of think tanks and academic institutions, and with the legacy media providing an assist when censorship requests went ignored.

While Elon Musk may have exited Twitter from the group, the Censorship Complex still stands tall and ready to silence the speech of those who dare dissent. This public-private collaboration makes the government’s move to monitor the internet even more threatening to free speech.

7. Those Who Could Warn the Public or Stop the Plot Are All-In

The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit. The corrupt media’s coverage, or lack thereof, of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s congressional testimony on the Censorship Complex proves this point. So too does the Democrats’ pathetic performance during the hearings, when they exposed themselves as enemies of free speech.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces—especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/grants-reveal-feds-horrific-plans-to-censor-americans-speech/

Facts??? What Facts? Who Cares?

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How the Virality Project Threatens Our Freedom

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked 
  • March 29, 2023

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • We now have proof that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to illegally censor Americans
  • During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media
  • In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government, even when they knew it was true
  • The Virality Project targeted first-hand accounts of COVID jab injuries to prevent vaccine hesitancy, and posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax.” They also censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in public health officials, and made asking questions a punishable event because questioning is “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation”
  • As bad as things are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In the last three years, the U.S. government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation”
  • The Department of Defense is also focused on research involving AI and tech that can monitor internet conversations and deploy countermeasures before wrongthink goes viral. Congress must defund all of these programs, as well as any agency department or team involved in censoring Americans

As detailed in “Propaganda and Censorship Dominate the Information War,” we now have proof, courtesy of the Twitter Files, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to censor Americans.1

In an Atlantic Council interview, EIP head Alex Stamos also admitted that the partnership between the EIP and the DHS was set up to outsource censorship that the government could not do due to “lack of legal authorization.”2

Stamos, a former chief of security at Facebook, is also director of the Stanford Internet Observatory — one of the four organizations that make up the EIP — and is a partner in the cyber consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with former CISA director Chris Krebs.

Virality Project Is EIP Rebranded

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content using a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media companies all share.3

In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government in the same way the EIP censored election narratives on behalf of the political Left.4

According to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, the Virality Project was essentially a dry run for President Biden’s federal Disinformation Governance Board.5 In fact, the Virality Project proposed a federal “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” just one day before President Biden announced the plan for this Orwellian outfit.

Public backlash forced Biden to reconsider, but all that means is that the government chose not to make its unconstitutional censoring of Americans official policy. They’re still doing it through partnerships with the EIP/Virality Project and other third parties.

Virality Project Censored Truth

In a March 20, 2023, report (video above), The Hill host Robby Soave detailed the goals of the Virality Project, which “above all else were to protect the perceived integrity of the federal health bureaucracy, vaccine manufacturers and government vaccine policymakers, and to advance mainstream establishment narratives and interests in general.”

As noted by Soave, the Virality Project frequently pressured social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information and/or label it as “misinformation” — even if the information was true.

“This coalition, which was working with government agencies, NGO’s and the social media companies themselves, took the position that even true information could count as dangerous misinformation if its effect was to encourage a policy that clashed with the expert consensus …

If we still value the First Amendment, we must resist these pernicious calls for censorship. A call that is coming from a sordid coalition of ‘truth czars’ and ideological activists masquerading as fact checkers,” Soave says.

The mere possibility of causing “vaccine skepticism” or “vaccine hesitancy” was enough of a justification to censor information about the deadly COVID shots, for example, even though the information was truthful and required in order to make an informed decision.

This even included true first-hand accounts of serious COVID jab injuries, which could have saved lives had they been allowed to be shared. As noted by Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder of EngageMedia and author at Brownstone Institute:6

“Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the ‘anti-disinformation’ field ran cover to protect Big Pharma, smearing and censoring critics.

The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal … [In] suppressing ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ the Virality Project put people in danger. Rather than keeping people safe they exposed us to the depredations of Big Pharma.”

Wartime Logic

Best-selling author John Leake7 also commented on the Virality Project’s censoring of truthful information, saying:8

“This reminded me of our recent trip to Australia in which we learned the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) led by Dr. John Skerritt, MD, PhD, made the decision to suppress accurate reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young people because such reports could cause ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

As these policymakers and regulators see it, the incidence of grave and fatal side effects are sufficiently rare to warrant censoring ANY reporting of them, as such reporting could cause the greater harm of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.

Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context — that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy — has this logic been applied.”

No Concerns, Jokes or Questions Allowed

The Virality Project also targeted posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports — because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax” — and censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in those targeted as the butt of the joke.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is one example of a public health official whose reputation was protected in this way. They even made asking questions a punishable event, because asking questions is a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”9

Have You Heard of Pre-Bunking?

The Virality Project also invented “pre-bunking” strategies to “warn” the public about purported misinformation before it had time to spread.

For example, when the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab was temporarily suspended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April 2021, the Virality Project issued a rapid response statement10 saying the number of incidents of rare and severe types of blood clots was “very small,” especially considering the millions of doses given.

They also analyzed the narratives put forth “concerning the J&J suspension within anti-vaccine groups across social media platforms” and in foreign and international media, and how these narratives might affect “vaccine hesitancy,” and proposed strategies to counter efforts to use the suspension as support for anti-COVID jab arguments.

Twitter Files Include Calls to Censor Me

As predicted, the Twitter files also contain correspondence with social media companies relating to yours truly. Taibbi points out the Twitter files “repeatedly show media acting as proxy”11 for the NGOs in the censoring network.

As an example, he posted the email below,12 in which the Financial Times used the shady NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate’s fabricated “Misinformation Dozen” report to pressure Twitter into banning me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the rest on its list.

misinformation dozen

Government Censorship Campaign Is Financed by Taxpayers

As noted by Taibbi in a March 9, 2023, Twitter thread:13

“Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott ‘misinformation’? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?

The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other ‘anti-disinformation’ labs are receiving huge public awards.

Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? …

This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does …

This, ultimately, is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.”

Censorship Darling With a Shady Past

You can learn more about Taibbi’s work on the Twitter files in the video above. In his Twitter Files No. 19 thread, Taibbi also highlights some of the shadier characters within this censorship-industrial complex, such as Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (which, again, is part of the EIP and Virality Project):14

“Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC and other agencies. In the video below … Stamos introduces her as having ‘worked for the CIA.'”

“DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals …

DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the Twitter files. Although it claimed to track ‘Russian influence,’ Hamilton really followed [Conservative] Americans … Hamilton 68 was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn was funded by the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is funded in part by — the Department of State.

The far worse scandal was Project Birmingham, in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate. Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore.

Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate …

The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.

By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate — e.g. that Russian ads ‘reached 126 million people’ in 2016 — while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds.”

US Government Is Building Vast Speech Suppression Web

As bad as things already are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In a March 21, 2023, article,15 The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland details grants showing the U.S. government is “building a vast surveillance and speech suppression web around every American.”

“Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet — the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced,” she writes.16

“While the ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare.

Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover ‘problematic’ speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

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

In the last three years alone, the federal government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Department of Defense itself is also focused on research involving AI and ML tech that can monitor internet conversations for objectionable viewpoints and deploy countermeasures before they go viral.

A Catch-22

Unfortunately, many of those who have the greatest power to inform the public about what’s happening, and those with the power to protect us by putting an end to this dystopian nightmare, don’t want to because they have something to gain from it, or believe they do. As noted by Cleveland:17

“The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces — especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Taibbi, in the video above, says the revelations about the Virality Project tell us two things:18

“One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”

This is deeply problematic and will strangle democracy and end the republic that is the United States if allowed to continue. To quote Lowenthal:19

“Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet, corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately, we need radically decentralized social media that is more immune to their capture. Our safety depends on it.”

Decentralizing social media is just one necessary defense tactic though. We must also demand Congress take swift action to defund and dismantle the “censorship-industrial complex” that is using our tax dollars to deceive us and withhold truth. Nothing less will suffice. We can’t invent enough privacy laws to protect us from what’s coming.

For a time, many of us suspected that this massive surveillance and control system was primarily funded and built by private interests, but now we’re finding that government funding is behind much, and perhaps most, of it.

Congress has, for many years, if not decades, approved funding for programs intended to destroy our constitutional rights. Now, they must defund all of them. They must also defund all government agency departments or teams involved in the federal censorship network, and that includes the FBI, CIA and DHS.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/29/how-virality-project-threatens-freedom.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230329_HL2&cid=DM1372268&bid=1758336702

Check This Out: “Safe and Effective” For WHAT????

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D*ed S*ddenly N*ws

September 23, 2022 • by Etana Hecht

Tiago Henriques launched a group that’s become a massive force.

Died Suddenly News

Tiago Fernando Henriques is an artifical intelligence programmer who lives in Canada. Back in the spring of 2021, he began to notice an unusually high number of his young peers experiencing serious medical issues, such as chest pain, seizures and strokes. He heard about a story from a friend about a buddy of his whose body went haywire 10 minutes after recieving the Pfizer shot. Mr. Henriques decided to go check out the situation for himself, and he took a trip out to North Sydney. The person in question was a disaster, paralyzed and not functional. After seeing him in June 2021, Mr. Henriques opened a Facebook group with the goal being support and communication from those who were injured from a Covid vaccine. The group grew organically for about a year, and had reached ~12k members at the beginning of this summer. Since then, the group has broken records for pace of growth. There currently are over 286,400 members, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Died Suddenly News is the name of the group, and it’s heartbreaking to realize that the growth of the group is due to people all over the world suffering suddenly, due to injuries or deaths of loved ones. Mr. Henriques personally approves every post in the group before it’s published, and he has a volunteer team of 30 moderators from all over the world in all time zones. The group has turned into a valuable resource, not only for people to find emotional and practical support, but for data. Mr. Henriques’s background as an AI specialist puts him in a position to be able to methodically collect and analyze data from the stories that are pouring in of post-vaccination disaster.

Mr. Henriques noted a few important pieces of information from the data he’s collected so far:

  1. The age of people reporting adverse events is dropping. More people of younger ages are suffering and dying.
  2. The group has become so large that there are now reports coming in that are clustered in specific geographic locations. This allows for targeted tracing of injuries or death by geographic cluster. Mr Henriques often finds spikes in adverse events reports from specific locations 3-4 months after a vaccine drive.
  3. For “sudden deaths” alone, there are 30-50 reports submitted per day. The total is well over 30,000 and makes up about 40% of the reports. The rest are injuries.
  4. Notable injury reports in high numbers include breast cancer for men, turbo-cancers, eye injuries, and sudden death of young athletes.

Censorship

Mr. Henriques is very well aware of the threat of censorship that hangs like a dark cloud over conversations on FB. Multiple similar groups have been shut down, including a group started in early 2021 by Brianne Dressen, a vaccine victim from the AstraZeneca clinical trials. As the group continues to explode in membership, Mr. Henriques is busy building an independent platform for the conversation and data analysis to continue, should the worst occur. He’s gladly accepting donations from those who’d like to contribute towards this expensive but important venture, and he created a GiveSendGo that details his plan.

Mr. Henriques appeared on Steve Kirsch’s weekly show VSRF last week and had a conversation with Mr. Kirsch about the group, how it began, and what his plans are moving forward.

The People

Died Suddenly News is a powerhouse, because it’s made up of the people. Heartbreaking stories flood in by the dozens every day from all over the world, the stories are eerily similar, and many people who post include that barely anyone in their circles will acknowledge the elephant in the room. Mr. Henriques and the group he launched is forcing the conversation to be had. It’s offering relief to those who feel like they live on a different planet from those they’re surrounded by who are blissfully, and sometimes willfully unaware of the unfolding disaster. It’s really difficult to confront, and those of us who have been surrounded by this information for over two years are growing more frustrated and confused by those who manage to continue to claim ignorance.

Well, they won’t be able to much longer, and as painful as it will be, we must reach that critical tipping point where vaccine injuries are acknowledged by the mainstream. The only way out of this mess is to go through it, and do our part to help the injured, share information and stand together against the medical criminals to resist their medical tyranny. Died Suddenly News is undoubtedly a huge force in pushing closer to the tipping point, and the stories on there remind us of the people behind the numbers. These are just a tiny sample from the dozens that are pouring in per day.

It’s time for accountability.

View Original Article

from:    https://dailyclout.io/ded-sddenly-nws/

Who Is Censoring You?

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al Collusion Between Government and Big Tech Exposed

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked
government and big tech collusion

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Federal officials in the Biden administration have held secret and illegal censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and to ban or deplatform those who share unauthorized views about COVID and vaccines
  • The evidence for this comes out of a lawsuit brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) against President Biden, filed in May 2022
  • Monthly, a Unified Strategies Group (USG) meeting took place — and may still be taking place — between a wide variety of government agencies and Big Tech companies, during which topics to be censored and suppressed were/are discussed
  • Censored topics included stories involving COVID jab refusal, especially those involving military refusals and consequences thereof, criticism against COVID restrictions and their effects on mental health, posts talking about testing positive for COVID after getting the jab, personal stories of COVID jab side effects, including menstrual irregularities, and worries about vaccine passports becoming mandatory
  • Discovery documents obtained so far have identified more than 50 federal employees across 15 federal agencies, engaged in illegal censorship activities. Emails from the strategic communications and marketing firm Reingold also reveals outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to violate Americans’ Constitutional free speech rights

In a September 1, 2022, article,1 the Post Millennial reveals how federal officials in the Biden administration have held secret censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and to ban or deplatform those who share unauthorized views about COVID and vaccines.

The evidence for this comes out of a lawsuit2 brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry) against President Biden, filed in May 2022.

During the discovery process, the plaintiffs sought to identify “all meetings with any social media platform relating to content modulation and/or misinformation,” which is how we now know that such illegal meetings did, in fact, take place.

Illegal Collusion to Suppress Free Speech

Monthly, a Unified Strategies Group (USG) meeting took place — and may still be taking place — between a wide variety of government agencies and Big Tech companies, during which topics to be censored and suppressed were/are discussed.

Censored topics included stories involving COVID jab refusal, especially those involving military refusals and consequences thereof, criticism against COVID restrictions and their effects on mental health, posts talking about testing positive for COVID after getting the jab, personal stories of COVID jab side effects, including menstrual irregularities, and worries about vaccine passports becoming mandatory.3 According to the New Civil Liberties Alliance:4

“… scores of federal officials … have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful.

Under the First Amendment, the federal government may not police private speech nor pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is precisely what the government has done — and is still doing — on a massive scale not previously divulged.

Multiple agencies’ communications demonstrate that the federal government has exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies — pressure to which companies have repeatedly bowed …

Communications show these federal officials are fully aware that the pressure they exert is an effective and necessary way to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship. The head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency even griped about the need to overcome social-media companies’ ‘hesitation’ to work with the government …

This unlawful government interference violates the fundamental right of free speech for all Americans, whether or not they are on social media. More discovery is needed to uncover the full extent of this regime — i.e., the identities of other White House and agency officials involved and the nature and content of their communications with social-media companies.”

Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance added:5

“If there was ever any doubt the federal government was behind censorship of Americans who dared to dissent from official COVID messaging, that doubt has been erased. The shocking extent of the government’s involvement in silencing Americans, through coercing social-media companies, has now been revealed …”

Federal Agencies Involved in Free Speech Suppression

Documents obtained so far have identified more than 50 federal employees across 15 federal agencies, who participated in these censorship meetings or otherwise engaged in illegal censorship activities.6 This includes officials from:

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Election Security and Resilience team
Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis
The FBI’s foreign influence taskforce
The Justice Department’s (DOJ) national security division
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence
White House staff (including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty and former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt)
Health and Human Services (HHS)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
The Office of the Surgeon General
The Census Bureau
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
The State Department
The U.S. Treasury Department
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission

Emails from a strategic communications and marketing firm called Reingold7 also reveals that outside consultants were hired to manage the government’s collusion with social media to censor Americans. For example, Reingold set up a “partner support portal” for the CDC so that CDC officials could link emails to the portal for easier flagging of content it wanted censored by social media companies linked to the portal.

Big Tech Companies Involved in Government Censorship

On the private industry side, notable tech participants in the censorship meetings include:

Google Facebook
Twitter YouTube
Reddit Microsoft
Verizon Media Pinterest
LinkedIn Wikimedia Foundation

While some social media companies may have “hesitated” to censor on the government’s behalf at times, Facebook was certainly an eager beaver from the get-go. As early as February 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in contact with the State Department, offering its services to help “control information and misinformation related to coronavirus.”8

Biden Administration’s ‘Executive Privilege’ Denied

As you might expect, the White House has not cooperated with discovery and have fought to keep communications secret — especially with regard to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s correspondence — claiming all White House communications as “privileged.”

However, executive privilege does NOT apply to external communications, so the plaintiffs called on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to “overrule the government defendants’ objections and order them to supply this highly relevant, responsive and probative information immediately.”

September 7, 2022, Judge Terry Doughty did just that. The Biden administration’s claim of executive privilege was rejected and Doughty ordered the White House to hand over any and all relevant records.9 That includes correspondence to and from Fauci, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and many others. According to the judge’s order, they have three weeks to comply.

Examples of Illegal Government Censorship

On Twitter,10 Missouri AG Schmitt has shared a long list of examples of government censorship, including one document in which Clarke Humphrey, COVID-19 response digital director at the White House, asked Facebook to take down the Instagram account “anthonyfauciofficial,” a parody account dedicated to making fun of Fauci.11 Facebook complied.

Schmitt also shared emails12,13 between a senior Facebook official and the surgeon general, stating, “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.” This email came on the heels of the surgeon general’s July 2021 “misinformation health advisory.”

The CDC also coordinated with Facebook, providing them with talking points to debunk various claims, including the claim that spike protein in the COVID shots is dangerous and cytotoxic. In a July 28, 2021, email, a CDC official provided Facebook with the following counter-narrative, taken straight from the “How mRNA Vaccines Work” section on the CDC website:14

“Messenger mRNA [sic] vaccines work by teaching our cells to create a harmless spike protein …” (Emphasis in the original.)

Fast-forward to mid-June 2022, and the CDC was suddenly less sure about the harmlessness of the spike protein.

Up until then, the words “harmless spike protein” had always been bolded, but in this June revision, they removed the bolding, along with an entire section in which they’d previously claimed that mRNA was rapidly broken down and spike protein did not last more than a few weeks in the body.15 Clearly, the truth was catching up to them and certain lies were getting too risky to hold on to.

CISA also reached out to Google, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), Microsoft and Twitter for help, shortly after the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board was announced.16 Fortunately, public outcry put an end to this Orwellian Ministry of Truth before it got started.

When Censorship Becomes Election Interference

According to The Washington Times:17

“Details about the Biden administration’s conduct raised the hackles of Republican lawmakers. ‘Confirming that this is the most dangerously anti-free speech administration in American history AND that Facebook … is nothing but an appendage of the deep state,’ Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, said on Twitter as he shared news of the court filing.”

Other lawmakers are also getting involved. In an August 29, 2022, letter18,19 to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin requested records of the government’s contacts with social media companies to ascertain whether the FBI and/or DOJ did, in fact, instruct them to censor information about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by falsely referring to it as “Russian disinformation.”20

Zuckerberg has also been asked21 to provide any correspondence involving the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, especially as it pertains to the FBI’s instructions to censor this political hot potato — something he openly admitted in a recent Joe Rogan interview (see video above).22

Lawmakers Pursue Legislation to Penalize Gov’t Censorship

Three Republican House Representatives on the House Oversight and Reform, Judiciary, and Commerce committees — Reps. James Comer of Kentucky, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington — have also introduced the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act23 (HR.8752), aimed at preventing federal employees from using their positions to influence censorship decisions by tech platforms.

The bill would create restrictions to prevent federal employees from asking or encouraging private entities to censor private speech or otherwise discourage free speech, and impose penalties, including civil fines and disciplinary actions for government employees who facilitate social media censorship.

While the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids government censoring and restricting free speech, HR. 8752 could be a helpful enforcement tool, as people might tend to think twice when they know there’s a real and personal price to pay.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/09/15/government-and-big-tech-collusion.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20220915_HL2&cid=DM1261937&bid=1604984985

What About Your Fact Checkers, Mark???

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Rapid response to:

Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial

BMJ 2021; 375 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2635 (Published 02 November 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;375:n2635

Rapid Response:

Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.

In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.

The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]

But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”

Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]

We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.

— It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong

— It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”

— The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”

— It contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in The BMJ article

— It published the story on its website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”

We have contacted Lead Stories, but they refuse to change anything about their article or actions that have led to Facebook flagging our article.

We have also contacted Facebook directly, requesting immediate removal of the “fact checking” label and any link to the Lead Stories article, thereby allowing our readers to freely share the article on your platform.

There is also a wider concern that we wish to raise. We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. To give one other example, we would highlight the treatment by Instagram (also owned by Meta) of Cochrane, the international provider of high quality systematic reviews of the medical evidence.[3] Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task. Fact checking has been a staple of good journalism for decades. What has happened in this instance should be of concern to anyone who values and relies on sources such as The BMJ.

We hope you will act swiftly: specifically to correct the error relating to The BMJ’s article and to review the processes that led to the error; and generally to reconsider your investment in and approach to fact checking overall.

Best wishes,

Fiona Godlee, editor in chief
Kamran Abbasi, incoming editor in chief
The BMJ

Competing interests:
As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains.

References:

[1] Thacker PD. Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial. BMJ. 2021 Nov 2;375:n2635. doi: 10.1136/bmj.n2635. PMID: 34728500. https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

[2] Miller D. Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials. Nov 10, 2021. ​​https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-british-medical-jo…

[3] https://twitter.com/cochranecollab/status/1458439812357185536

Competing interests: As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains.

from:    https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr-80

What YouTube Sees

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YouTube Bans all Content That Questions the Safety or Effectiveness of Vaccines

October 3, 2021 Information Liberation 1

Censorship, Unsplash
Youtube, under Susan Wojcicki’s leadership, has already removed 130,000 videos for violating their COVID-19 vaccine policies, and the company is now expanding its ban to criticism of other vaccines as well. Despite evidence showing that autism is linked to vaccines, Matt Halprin, the global head of trust and safety at YouTube, said, “The ban will include any media that claims vaccines are dangerous or lead to chronic health outcomes such as autism.” Videos by Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Dr. Joseph Mercola have been removed.-GEG

Under YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s new speech codes, YouTubers can now be banned for quoting CDC director Rochelle Walensky admitting last month on live TV that covid shots do not “prevent transmission” of the virus.

From YouTube’s Official Blog, “Managing harmful vaccine content on YouTube”:

Today, we’re expanding our medical misinformation policies on YouTube with new guidelines on currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and the WHO.

[…] Since last year, we’ve removed over 130,000 videos for violating our COVID-19 vaccine policies. 

[…] We’ve steadily seen false claims about the coronavirus vaccines spill over into misinformation about vaccines in general, and we’re now at a point where it’s more important than ever to expand the work we started with COVID-19 to other vaccines. 

Specifically, content that falsely alleges that approved vaccines are dangerous and cause chronic health effects, claims that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease, or contains misinformation on the substances contained in vaccines will be removed. This would include content that falsely says that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility, or that substances in vaccines can track those who receive them. Our policies not only cover specific routine immunizations like for measles or Hepatitis B, but also apply to general statements about vaccines.

 

Read full article here…

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2021/10/youtube-bans-all-content-that-questions-the-safety-or-effectiveness-of-vaccines/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=youtube-bans-all-content-that-questions-the-safety-or-effectiveness-of-vaccines

Pay No Attention to he Facts

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facebook

Facebook Labeling 100% Facts About Vaccine Company Corruption as ‘Misinformation’

Don Via Jr. May 18, 2021

The censors at Facebook’s ministry of truth have sunk to a new low. Yesterday at 1:35 p.m. EST, TFTP journalist Don Via Jr received a 24-hour ban on the platform for posting a completely factually accurate meme acknowledging big pharma’s history of rampant corruption.

Unlike other instances of individuals being censored on the platform however, in which the social media company attempts to thinly veil their censorship behind openly biased fact-checkers. This time there was none. No “fact check” for “false information”. Simply a notification of the post being removed from Mr. Via’s Break The Matrix Facebook page, and a notice that all of his accounts were restricted for 24 hours.

Below is the meme in question.

What makes this act of censorship particularly egregious is the blatant nature with which Facebook is now suppressing 100% verifiable facts.

After disputing the decision, Facebook replied with an automated message stating “We don’t allow false information that could cause physical harm. In some cases this includes information that recognized health organizations say could mislead people about how to cure or prevent a disease or that could discourage people from seeking medical treatment.”

In this case though, none of the information stated was false.

For instance, the first tier of the graphic claims that since inception in 1848, Pfizer has racked up nearly 5 billion dollars in criminal charges. While the exact total may vary a bit, the facts regarding their history of rampant corruption and medical malfeasance is.

In 1991, the FDA charged Pfizer subsidiary Shiley with withholding information from safety regulators and deliberately falsifying manufacturing records with regards to faulty heart valves. Nearly 300 people died from Pfizer’s faulty products and ultimately the company spent 205 million dollars settling the tens of thousands of lawsuits filed against them.

Despite this, Pfizer resisted to comply with FDA orders to notify patients and ultimately paid an additional $10 million when the Department of Justice charged them with lying to regulators.

In 2009, among other allegations of human rights abuses, Pfizer agreed to settle a lawsuit for $75 million after a lengthy court dispute in which it was charged with using Nigerian children as human guinea pigs.

In 2012 the company was forced to pay 60 million dollars after it was exposed for bribing foreign doctors to sell their products.

These are only a select few examples of the company’s history rife with criminal activity. More can be seen under Pfizer’s corporate rap sheet via the Corporate Research Project.

The second tier of the meme asserts that Moderna has not successfully completed the production of a viable vaccine in the company’s history. This can be confirmed via a simple internet search. In May of 2020, it was reported by The Daily Mail and CNN that Moderna has a track record of never bringing a successful vaccine to market since the company’s founding in 2010.

Furthermore, despite the company’s dubious past it was reported that Moderna was first tapped to lead U.S. vaccine development in what equated to a gamble. Simply because the company’s slick talking CEO was able to get the attention of former President Trump with bold promises during a meeting with biotech executives.

The third tier of the meme acknowledges the well-documented history of heinous crimes committed by Johnson & Johnson. Of which TFTP has also extensively covered in recent years.

As we reported in 2016, the company was forced to pay out billions of dollars in several lawsuits for continuing the sale of products they knew were causing cancer.

J&J has also been found guilty of irresponsible marketing practices and penalized nearly 600 million dollars for their role in fueling the opiate epidemic. As well as having been caught hiding crucial laboratory data from safety inspectors — resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

But these only scratch the surface of the company’s flagrant human rights abuses. Among them, being one of the main financiers alongside, Dow Chemical and the United States Army, funding 20 years of unethical human experiments by Dr. Albert Kligman in Pennsylvania’s Holmesburg prison. Experiments which entailed prisoners being financially coerced to “volunteer” as research subjects to study mind-altering drugs, painful medical procedures, radiation, and chemical weapons such as Agent Orange.

As a matter of fact, in addition to Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson — It is thoroughly documented by the Corporate Research Project that nearly every major company involved in the development of Covid-19 vaccines has an abhorrent history of medical malfeasance, and criminal charges.

Finally, the last section of the meme asserts that AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine has itself already been suspended in 24 countries due to health concerns. Yet again, a simple query in your preferred search engine can corroborate this as a fact.

As a March 16th report from Al Jazeera explains; the countries of Sweden, Latvia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Portugal, Slovenia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Bulgaria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Thailand, Romania, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Austria have all suspended the Oxford / AstraZeneca jab in some capacity.

Since that report the Philippines and Australia have also suspended the shot for individuals under 60 years of age. Venezuela has also refused to authorize it.

What Facebook is doing by deleting this content, which by all accounts is completely accurate, is suppressing vital information that the people have a right to know. Informed consent matters, and it’s not something that can be so freely thrown to the wayside — certainly not as adverse events reported to the CDC are at an all-time high.

Facebook, as we have reported ad nauseam, works alongside government entities to facilitate their censorship. And more recently was even implicated in a lawsuit filed by Robert F Kennedy Jr as directly taking orders from the government to stifle concerns for vaccine safety on its platform.

The company is now essentially working as a cover-up crew to protect those with which they have a vested financial or political interest. While their counterparts in the mainstream media ingloriously propagate the notion that those concerned with vaccine safety are domestic terrorists.

Bodily autonomy is paramount, and individuals have an inherent right to be given all the facts so that they are adequately informed to make proper decisions with regard to their health.

Just because the truth is unpleasant, does not make it misinformation. As a matter of fact, censoring unpleasant truths in favor of biased one-sided narratives is the greatest danger of all.

from:   https://thefreethoughtproject.com/facebook-labeling-100-facts-about-vaccine-company-corruption-as-misinformation/

Keepin’ it on the DL

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Why OpSec Has Never Been More Important

by Tyler Durden
Wednesday, Jan 13, 2021 – 0:05

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

If you’ve been in prepper circles for long, you’ve probably heard the term OpSec. It is taken from military jargon and it’s short for Operations Security. In the preparedness and survival world, it generally means not letting other people know that you are prepped, or if they know, they definitely don’t know the specifics of what you have.

Not only do we want to keep the level of our preparedness private, these days, keeping our opinions private might be likewise beneficial from a security perspective. More on that in a moment.

Trigger Warning: There’s no way I can write this article without ticking somebody off. Some readers will feel that I’m siding with the right and others will feel like I’m siding with the left. I’m not because I am not a Democrat or a Republic, nor am I a conservative or a liberal. I’m a critical thinker with diverse opinions that fall into all sorts of categories. Yet others will feel I didn’t go far enough or that there’s some “fact” or conspiracy that I didn’t reveal. I’m not an ice cream cone. I can’t make everyone happy. Also, there may be some swearing.

What is OpSec?

Here’s a definition for those who aren’t familiar with the concept.

Operations security (OPSEC) is a process that identifies critical information to determine if friendly actions can be observed by enemy intelligence, determines if information obtained by adversaries could be interpreted to be useful to them, and then executes selected measures that eliminate or reduce adversary exploitation of friendly critical information.

In a more general sense, OPSEC is the process of protecting individual pieces of data that could be grouped together to give the bigger picture (called aggregation). OPSEC is the protection of critical information deemed mission-essential from military commanders, senior leaders, management or other decision-making bodies. The process results in the development of countermeasures, which include technical and non-technical measures such as the use of email encryption software, taking precautions against eavesdropping, paying close attention to a picture you have taken (such as items in the background), or not talking openly on social media sites about information on the unit, activity or organization’s Critical Information List. (source)

This article explains the concept more thoroughly.

OpSec goes hand in hand with the gray man principle. Here’s Selco’s definition of being the gray man.

It is a simple concept that comes to be very important when SHTF, and it is often completely opposite to how a lot of preppers are planning to look or act.

In the shortest definition, it is staying uninteresting or simply looking and acting like most of the people around you in a particular moment.

It can be used in a lot of situations when SHTF, during prolonged periods of time, or during short-term events. (source)

As tensions increase dramatically in the United States, many people will find it more important than ever to practice these principles.

Extraordinary things are happening.

Over the past few years, the United States has become extremely polarized – so much so that violence can break out simply because two people or groups of people support different presidential candidates.

We’re seeing “othering” on an extraordinary level as Big Tech and the Mainstream Media throw gasoline on the raging dumpster fire that is our recent election. There’s a purge of conservative voices that goes beyond anything I’ve personally seen – way beyond the purge of alternative media a couple of years ago.

While Donald Trump is on his way out of the White House in just under two weeks, the fact remains that the two largest social media outlets in the world, Facebook and Twitter, have suspended the accounts of a sitting President of the United States. Now, they’re private businesses – they get to make their own rules and they’re protected from any legal fallout by Section 230, unlike the rest of us folks on the internet. However, the fact that they would take such an action is simply astounding in its audacity.

Go to a different outlet, you said? Well, that would be a great idea so we did. Conservatives and libertarians went to Parler in droves and the MSM sobbed into their lattes that it was a threat to democracy. And guess what else happened? Google effectively killed Parler today by removing the app from the store. José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said:

“In order to protect user safety on Google Play, our longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence.

All developers agree to these terms and we have reminded Parler of this clear policy in recent months.

We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.

We recognize that there can be reasonable debate about content policies and that it can be difficult for apps to immediately remove all violative content, but for us to distribute an app through Google Play, we do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.

In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues.” (source)

Apple has also given Parler an ultimatum to either moderate content or get nuked there too.

And speaking of egregious things, the glaring double standard between the media coverage in Washington DC on Jan. 6th and the coverage of “protests” all over the country for the past year is particularly flagrant.

This blatant silencing of dissent is heinous and reminiscent of Communist China or North Korea. I mean, the DoJ did just revive the legality of firing squads. While we’re not currently being executed for dissenting opinions, people are losing their livelihoods, having their homes vandalized, and being ostracized. ABC News literally called for a cleansing of Trump supporters.

“Even aside from impeachment and 25th Amendment talk, Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days,” ABC’s Rick Klein and MaryAlice Parks wrote for The Note on Thursday. “The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”

It now reads, “Cleaning up the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”

Klein also shared the original phrase on Twitter before deleting it.(source)

Do they wish to “cleanse” all 74,223,744 people whose votes were considered official? It’s rather reminiscent of a recent hullabaloo when another guy on Twitter wanted to send Trump voters to re-education camps. (See #7 here.)

Incidentally – neither Klein’s account nor ABC News’s account were suspended by Twitter. Nor was that guy who wants to forcibly re-educate people. Just the President’s. Oh and a whole bunch of other people who had the audacity to be publicly supportive of him. But not those cleanser and re-education people. They’re cool.

Know what you’re getting yourself into before taking action.

If you’re anything like me, your initial reaction is, “F*ck this. I’ll say what I want.” I agree wholeheartedly that this is outrageous censorship on a massive scale, it’s virtual book-burning, and the double standard is utter bullsh*t and I’m furious about it.

But this is, first and foremost, a website about survival and preparedness. This is not a site about staging a revolution and I have really limited the coverage of politics since the 2016 election. I want it to be a place where everyone feels welcome to learn about preparedness and the events that affect us, regardless of their political beliefs, their religious beliefs, or which foot they put in their pants leg first.

There will be people out there who feel it is their duty to fight. There are people who support that and people who do not.

Unless you are making a conscious decision to get out there in the thick of the battle, imperiling your livelihood and risking ostracization due to cancel culture, it may be time for you to consider strengthening your OpSec. If you are going into this with your eyes open, then more power to you all.

Crackdowns like what we’re seeing now start with polarization and information blackouts. They can lead to far worse scenarios.

Selco wrote:

It is a situation where all stakes are much higher, and solutions-actions  that the government ( ruling  party, military leaders or whoever in your case) wants to achieve will be attempted with all means. That can include some new rules where what you think about it usually does not mean anything.

A lot of preppers think about “martial law” but in reality, they think about it still in normal terms, with rights, law, constitution, and rules…

You cannot defy military, at least not openly, because they will deal with you fast and efficiently. In times like that it is so easy to get labeled that you are dangerous, an enemy of the state, a terrorist or anything similar, and most probably you will not have any help.

Forget about the movie illusions of openly being a freedom fighter.

No matter how well-organized you are, those who impose martial law have better organization than you. Remember that martial law usually means an information blackout.  “They” will own information and present it to the public the way that they want to present it. (source)

While I’m not suggesting we’re necessarily headed for martial law, we have stepped into a brand new world where our media is tightly controlled and our every decision or utterance can come back to haunt us.

Why do we need to focus more stringently on OpSec now?

I want to focus on the survival and preparedness aspects of this unbelievable situation we now find ourselves in.

As I’ve written before, survival is about surviving. Some people find this philosophy cowardly and feel we should all be willing to choose the hill of their choice to die upon. Others believe that it’s better to be strategic, live to fight another day, and choose their battles. This is a personal decision.

If you don’t wish to be involved in the political aspects of the things going on right now, if you want to quietly live out your life with limited conflict, and if your focus is on the safety of your family, you need to think about the information you are giving away about yourself. This is not just information for people of one political party or race. It’s for those who don’t want to be targeted because of their beliefs.

  • Don’t make a visual statement. Do you have any political paraphernalia on display? Bumper stickers? Yard signs? Banners? T-shirts or hats?
  • Avoid political conversations. Back when I was a kid, I was told that politics and religion were topics that were bad manners unless you were in the company of those you knew really well.
  • Keep your preps under wraps. Trust me, when The Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2021 happens – and it will – you don’t want to be the house with all the toilet paper that the guy repairing your furnace saw. Nobody needs to see your preps. Put things in cardboard boxes with misleading labels like “Christmas” if someone is going to be in the area where you store supplies. Don’t have shelves and shelves of canned goods out in your kitchen.
  • Tighten your circle. If you thought 2020 was bad, 2021 is here and it’s old enough to drink. As expected, 2021 is not going to be a walk in the park. Selco recommends that the worse things become, the smaller your circle should be. Focus your efforts on the things you can control and your energy on the people in your inner circle.
  • Remember what you learned about people. We learned a lot about how those around us handled stress during the first round of lockdowns. Don’t forget the lessons you learned about those in your circle, as well as what you discovered about friends, neighbors, and coworkers. A lot of folks were really surprised by the behavior of others when they were under stress. Think about who you really want to let in – this may have changed after the past year. Do your best to make sure that people are truly worthy of your trust.
  • Be neutral on social media. Remember, the internet is forever. Even if you delete an ill-advised post, someone may have taken a screenshot or be able to find that post on the Wayback Machine. People don’t have to have the visible proof of those posts either to remember you dislike Trump or Biden, or that you’re super liberal or super conservative. Posting meme after meme expressing your adoration for certain political figures or beliefs is the digital equivalent of running your mouth in a crowded bar. You never know who’s watching or listening, nor do you know how that might come back to haunt you.

Don’t make yourself a target.

When people are hungry they’ll do things they might never have imagined doing before, like stealing food. Many of the jobs lost in 2020 are not going to be coming back in 2021, people are dealing with major financial problems, and we have supply chain issues. There’s a very real chance that we will see greater poverty in America happening to a greater number of people than we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes.

Those people will be wracking their brains trying to figure out how to survive. Don’t give them a reason to think of your place as a supply nirvana.

(If you are in that desperate position, check out this book – it’s free and it may help you make difficult decisions.)

When people are angry, they’ll also do things they normally would not and mob mentality is contagious. Take this former CEO, for example.

“My decision to enter the Capitol was wrong, and I am deeply regretful to have done so,” Rukstales said in a statement. “Without qualification and as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, I condemn the violence and destruction that took place in Washington.”

Rukstales also apologized to his family, colleagues and “fellow countrymen” for his actions.

“It was the single worst personal decision of my life,” the exec’s statement continued. “I have no excuse for my actions and wish that I could take them back.” (source)

Don’t make yourself a target for the rage of people who aren’t behaving rationally. Your memes and banners and bumper stickers aren’t going to change their minds.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/why-opsec-has-never-been-more-important?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

SAVE Everything

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Episode 384 – The Library of Alexandria is on Fire

• 09/18/2020

We all know the story of the Library of Alexandria, the vast repository of ancient texts that was burnt to the ground by Caesar in 48 B.C. While the story itself isn’t accurate, it speaks to us today as we face the digital book burnings that are threatening the modern-day Library of Alexandria: the internet. In this speech delivered at the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s Justice Rising conference on September 13, 2020, James Corbett connects the dots from that ancient story to the internet censorship of today, and outlines what we can do to fight the fire that is threatening our most important information.

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES:
Justice Rising conference

9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money

Why Aren’t Insurers 9/11 Truthers? – Questions For Corbett #067

9/11: Decade of Deception

Operation Northwoods

Press For Truth BANNED On YouTube!

The Library of Babel – FLNWO #27

Century of Enslavement: The History of The Federal Reserve

YouTube Blacklists Federal Reserve Information. It’s Up To YOU To Spread It!

Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube

Twitter shadowbans content

Former Twitter software engineer Abhinav Vadrevu explains shadowbanning

Who Will Fact Check the Fact Checkers?

Gordon Crovitz Newsguard co-founder

Newsguard advisors

Agamben book burning quotation

Fahrenheit 451

Aeschylus Meets the Mummy: 2,500-Year-Old, Lost Greek Trilogy Found Under Wraps

from:   https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-384-the-library-of-alexandria-is-on-fire/

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YouTube Releases CONSPIRACY DEBUNKING FACT-CHECK FEATURE…What Could Go Wrong??

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YouTube, who falls under Google, who falls under Alphabet Inc. have appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion as they are now bringing their “fact-checking information panels” to the UK and Germany as part of an international crusade against “misinformation”. In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth speaks with Josh Sigurdson of World Alternative Media about YouTube’s incremental moves towards the all out censorship of alternative voices in 2020 and how the free flow of information isn’t necessarily dissipating…it’s just being redirected into other channels that just so happen to not be controlled by them!
 

WATCH ON ➜ BITCHUTE 

from: https://pressfortruth.ca/youtube-releases-conspiracy-debunking-fact-check-featurewhat-could-go-wrong/