Posted originally on the CTH on March 26, 2023 | Sundance
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the current U.S. position on social media platform TikTok and the larger issues with government censorship and control as he has outlined within the ‘Twitter Files.’
Readers and observers should note how Council on Foreign Relations member Ms. Bartiromo again introduces the TikTok narrative around the ability of the Chinese government to request user data from TikTok, while Ms. Bartiromo seemingly ignores the U.S. surveillance policy that grants DOJ/FBI officials identical access to user data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Apple, etc.
However, independent thinking Matt Taibbi does a great job with that question and reminds Ms Bartiromo the Senate Select Committee functions in the USA exactly as she is concerned about the CCP acting in China. [lolol.. Go Matt!] Bartiromo quickly dodges the point and moves on. WATCH:
I like Matt Taibbi, even when he was a willfully blind lefty, he was always a curious cat. Deep State gotta Deep State. The cause of the “dramatic change” Taibbi notes has a name, it’s called Donald Trump.
Posted originally on the CTH on March 9, 2023 | Sundance
Journalist Matt Taibbi released another Twitter File review today [#18 Available Here] showcasing how the opinion of government interests was pushed toward content censorship regardless of the truth within it.
File #18 release is a walk through all of government interests from COVID-19, Vaccination Compliance and maintenance of the Trump-Russia narrative.
I strongly suggest everyone to review the citations Taibbi presents from the documents contained within Twitter’s internal communication. SEE HERE.
One aspect that draws particular interest to those who spent years deconstructing the false Trump-Russia narrative, appears in the section beginning in Tweet #34 where Taibbi again visits the influence of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
At the epicenter of the SSCI effort we have always found then Vice-Chair Mark Warner manipulating events. Taibbi pulls this thread a little further with his review of how the SSCI contracted with outside government agencies to maintain the false premise of Russian interference in the 2016 election. A name that might be familiar to those who read the SSCI report on “Russian Active Measures and Disinformation in the 2016 Campaign” might be familiar to you. Taibbi notes:
Profiles portray [Renee] 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 from @MikeBenzCyber, Stamos introduces [Renee DiResta] 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.
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.
DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the #TwitterFiles. Although it claimed to track “Russian influence,” Hamilton really followed Americans like “Ultra Maga Dog Mom,” “Right2Liberty,” even a British rugby player named Rod Bishop.
On page #3 of the SSCI report, you will note how Renee DiResta was a key player in helping Mark Warner and the Senate Intel Committee to maintain a false narrative against the presidency of Donald Trump. [pdf, page #3 – citation below]:
You can see how the legislative branch, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the same institution that created the weaponized intelligence apparatus where they held oversight, subcontracted the Trump-Russia evidence finding to partners of the intelligence community. This is a symbiotic relationship.
Taibbi is on the right trail in following the SSCI and HPSCI manipulation of the social media platforms, specifically Twitter. In addition to the SSCI creating the structure that supports the intelligence weaponization by DHS and FBI, Senate Intel Chair Richard Burr and then Senate Intel Vice-Chair Mark Warner are at the epicenter of it.
Posted originally on the CTH on March 2, 2023 | Sundance
Matt Taibbi has done another extensive review of Twitter data in File Release #17 HERE. This information release focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an internal sub-agency within the State Department as constructed by the Obama administration.
As noted by Taibbi, the GEC was funded mostly from the Pentagon and the financial outlays were to various leftist organizations who constructed the Trump-Russia narrative.
The outcome of the original deception created a need for the illusion of “foreign influence agents” in U.S. social media, specifically in this instance, Twitter. The GEC was created as a targeting system to label any voice adverse to the Obama interests as a “foreign actor.”
Generally speaking, the GEC network identified usernames and social media account information they deemed adversarial to the Obama administration, then told Twitter to take down the accounts. The people working within GEC were political activists, financed through government agencies by the very taxpayers’ they were targeting. Ironic, no?
I strongly urge deep weed political walkers to review the entire outline – SEE HERE. However, in the bigger picture I would not the motive that pixel-focused Matt Taibbi cannot see.
Labeling domestic social media users as “foreign actors” was/is indeed a good way to remove voices who might oppose the administration agenda.
Yes, it is also government censorship carried out on a mass scale, but, well, details, details…. Congress -through inaction- has already evidence, they don’t care about this issue. Yet it is simultaneously good for fundraising and political soundbites.
There is actually a bigger issue behind these “foreign actor” labels as applied.
How many of these user accounts were then subsequently subjected to NSA level DHS surveillance under the legal justification of ‘foreign actor’ designation?
The various interagency groups, funded by taxpayer dollars, were essentially designating accounts as foreign influence…. ergo, national security applies. We’ve long discussed how ‘national security’ designations now mean no oversight from any other agency or branch of government, including the legislative and judicial branches.
Accept that reality and suddenly you realize the GEC activity is creating a legal mechanism to do metadata surveillance on the account (an actual person) and all of their contacts. Think of it like FISA Title-1 search warrants applied domestically to social media. After all, John Smith in Omaha, Nebraska, was just designated as a potential national security threat by the Global Engagement Center. See how that works?
Lists are generated, DHS portals open up, NSA and FBI databases are accessed, keystrokes are made, search perimeters are input and voilà, John Smith’s entire life and the life of his contacts is available within moments.
To those who cannot see the bigger picture of this system, please remind yourself this is nothing more than an extension of a concept triggered by Attorney General Eric Holder when the first system using the IRS schedule-B’s was deployed. Lists created, backgrounds checked, targets made, and domestic threats defined as political opposition.
Use of the IRS data became public in 2012, and they switched to the now more modern metadata collection available through DHS (FBI) contractors with access to the NSA database. Insert years of FISA Court and NSA teeth gnashing here, as the weaponization of the database raged on with promises to stop doing it… and promises… and promises… and even more promises.
Take the GEC overlay, which is essentially the targeting definitions of domestic threats, and look at the GEC outcomes through this prism of ongoing surveillance. What do you see?
If the GEC (DHS/FBI) was conducting this process through Twitter, the strong likelihood is that they were also using the exact same system on all other social media platforms. Heck, they probably still are.
All of it, from the origin with the IRS to the NSA databases, to the GEC definitions, is one massive network Obama era created domestic surveillance, under the auspices of national security.
Can you see it now?
Last point… to the issue most concerning to Matt Taibbi, the internecine support and alignment by media. The GEC used media to create the justification for their work, and the stenographers in the media gleefully complied.
Lee Smith makes an important point in this brief podcast excerpt. {Direct Rumble Link Here} We have outlined his point on these pages for several years.
Essentially, this is the point Lee Smith was driving home last October. The U.S. Corporate Media and the Big Tech monopolies are the front force of the new national security and intelligence state.
It is a relationship that extends far beyond the customary leanings of media, and now covers a full synergistic relationship. WATCH:
“We’re all familiar with the fact that the press has historically leaned to the left. That’s not what we’re looking at now. We’re looking at something very, very different. We’re looking at the press as being a part of the intelligence community. They are the ones who is putting these operations out there.”
The New York Times and Politico are the public relations firms for Main Justice, the DOJ and FBI. The Washington Post handles the needs of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Central Intelligence Agency. Meanwhile CNN is managed by the needs of the U.S. State Dept.
These direct relationships have been discussed here for several years; the Twitter Files are just putting details on the issue. This release is also highlighting how purposeful those govt-media relationships are in keeping the American public under surveillance.
Posted originally on the CTH on February 12, 2023 | Sundance
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi is looking for some additional research assistance [SEE HERE]. Specifically, after going a little deeper on the Twitter Files, Taibbi appears to be recognizing the visibility of the Fourth Branch of Government. He now needs to package the truth of it, in a way his former tribe will accept.
As a consequence, Taibbi is looking for (1) a reporter or academic with experience researching government contracts, and/or the funding of NGOs or academic research institutions; and (2) an infographics designer, preferably with experience in areas like ecosystem mapping.
Taibbi is a solid and inquisitive research journalist. However, he is still averse to recognizing Chicago Jesus as the originator of the modern issues he is outlining.
The issue of not accepting the Obama network as the structure that underpins the modern political surveillance state is common, even amid the tribe of walkaways from the progressive system.
Give him time, he’ll find see it.
From his current mission as expressed: […] “For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.
In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.
The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian “psychological operation” serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.
The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.
Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed. This project is about both of those things, too.
Foreign state media is labeled on platforms like Twitter.
I want to put labels on our own propaganda, and need your help to do it.”
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; that system was created by President George W Bush and VP Dick Cheney. Instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons only targeted one side of the political continuum.
The intelligence apparatus does not want their public-private partnership, between government and big tech social media, interfered with. President Obama steps forth in April 2022 to put an exclamation point in place, saying the public-private partnership he created must control the information. WATCH:
I cannot emphasize strongly enough; how close this collective demand is to a similar construct in Orwell’s 1984 prediction of “The Ministry of Truth.” Indeed, if you follow the need for government control of information its logical conclusion, these demands by the U.S. deep state architects are identical.
I also hope readers can see this speech for what it is. THIS is exactly what we were warning about when the shadows were moving feverously in the past several weeks {GO DEEP}. The catchphrases “disinformation”, “misinformation” and “malinformation” are being cited by President Obama in that speech. Where did that lingo come from? THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY {SEE HERE}
At the top of all critical issues we must understand, share and keep focus on, the issue surrounding the free flow of information is the most critical.
Free speech, social media platforming, user bans, censorship, demonetization, financial targeting of Canadian truckers, Elon Musk purchasing Twitter then reveals the Twitter files, our ability to communicate, the culture war, the digital identity issue, heck, even your ability to read this, all of it, surrounds the central component of information.
This is the big war. Controlling, labeling, emphasizing, downplaying, removing, information; everything else is downstream from this fight.
While President Obama talked about the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, it was only a week prior when the White House officially admitted to creating misinformation, disinformation and malinformation as part of their strategic campaign against Russia in Ukraine. NBC news gleefully embraced the strategy {SEE HERE}.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has an official agency mission {SEE HERE} to “help the American people understand the scope and scale of Mal, Dis, and Misinformation activities,” and Google/DuckDuckGo/Big Tech have officially aligned with both U.S. government interests promising to target, remove and penalize any entity engaged in Mal, Dis and Misinformation activities.
Putting aside the creation of lies to advance a strategic geopolitical objective, the bigger admission in the U.S. government is that much of the information coming to the American public – from them – is manufactured, false, fabricated and wrong.
Simultaneous to this admission of manufactured lies, the platforms of Big Tech and social media are saying they will target, remove and block any content that contradicts the official government position. The govt boldly admits they lie, and social media states they will block anyone who refutes those lies.
In the case of Google, the dominating search engine for information over the internet, they state it is an infraction against their policy to espouse a claim “that contradicts official government records.” Yet, the U.S. government is officially admitting the information they are creating for the government records, is self-admittedly false….. and now in comes DuckDuckGo with the assist.
Not wanting to overinflate the CTH position, but this admitted reality is exactly why we have taken the following position.
…”There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation”. There is only information you accept and information you do not accept. You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”…
There are only two elements within the public discussion of information, truth and not truth.
In an era filled with “fact-checkers” and institutional guardians at the gates of Big Tech, let me explain exactly why it is important not to accept the speech rules of the guards.
When you accept the terms “disinformation”, “misinformation” or the newest lingo, “malinformation,” you are beginning to categorize truth and lies in various shades. You are merging black and white, right and wrong, into various shades of grey.
When your mind works in the grey zone, you are, by direct and factual consequence, saying there is a problem. You are correct; however, this is where people may make a mistake. That problem is supposed to be there.
It is not a solution to the problem to try and remove the grey simply because it takes too much work to separate the white pixels from the black ones.
You were born with a gift, the greatest gift a loving God could provide. You were born with a brain and set of natural instincts that are tools to do this pixel separation, use them.
If you define the grey work as a problem you cannot solve on your own, you open the door for others to solve that problem for you. You begin to abdicate the work, and that’s when trouble can enter. The sliding scale of Pinocchios is one of the most familiar yet goofy outcomes.
Put more clearly, when you accept the terminology “disinformation”, you accept a problem. The problem is then the tool by which authorities will step in to make judgements. Speech, in its most consequential form, is then qualified by others to whom you have sub-contracted your thinking.
When you willingly sub-contract information filters to others, you have lost connection with the raw information. CTH was founded upon the belief that truth has no agenda, nor does it care about you, your feelings, or your opinion of it. It just sits there, empirically existing as evidence of information in its most pure form.
The search for truth, in all things, is the mission objective of this assembly. Often, we don’t like the truth; often, the truth is bitter, cold, challenging and even painful to accept. However, the truth doesn’t care. Information in its most raw form is ambivalent to your opinion. If you struggle to accept these things, that’s when you need grey. The New York Times is not called the “grey lady” accidentally.
Personally, I am an absorber of information – perhaps on a scale that is unusual. But I do not discount information from any form until I can put context to it and see if the information makes sense given all the variables present. When something doesn’t feel right, it’s almost always because it isn’t right.
Often, I find myself struggling in the grey and complex. It is not unusual to spend days researching, digging, clarifying a situation, only to discover the path to finding the truth is in another direction entirely. Erasing everything and starting over is frustrating, but it is genuinely the only approach that works; and often finding truth is supposed to be difficult, that’s why it is rewarding.
In the digital information age, we are bombarded with information. It is easy to be overwhelmed and need to find something or someone who has better skills at separating the black grains from the white ones. All opinions in this quest should be considered; thus, it is important to allow the free flow of information.
I am not necessarily a speech absolutist. There is some language that needs to be constrained if we are to participate in a respectful society, with grandma’s rules and knowing the audience. The CTH has guidelines for comments for this exact reason. However, those constraints need to be based on a set of inherent values. When it comes to information it is important to draw a distinction from speech.
There needs to be an open venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there’s an opportunity for information to be manipulated – even weaponized. Saul Alinsky spent decades pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech. Alinsky’s intentions, in the endeavor to change society by changing how language and information was used, were not good. He devoted his completed rulebook book to Lucifer.
Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove speech from the discussion.
You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a God-given brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.
Unfortunately, the collectively aligned group of U.S. Govt, the Intelligence Community and now Big Tech, are saying they will put every roadblock they can muster in your way as you attempt to navigate through the misinformation they control.
Team Obama built the system, and now Team Obama are defending the system.
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
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