spying – The Burning Platform

Psaki: If You Post Misinformation Online You Should Be Banned From All Social Media Platforms

Do we need any more proof that Facebook is a government surveillance entity created by DARPA to spy on us and control our perceptions? How does Biden’s Administration have access to our private conversations on Facebook? As long as Facebook and other social media companies are SPYING on people they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with the “muh private company” excuse.

Psaki doubles down on calls for censorship of "disinformation:"

"It should not come as any surprise we are in regular touch with social media platforms…and we want to know that the social media platforms are taking steps to address this." pic.twitter.com/YxIsFJ2iwg

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) July 16, 2021

REPORTER: You went through kind of top line details on this yesterday, but can you elaborate a little bit on the Facebook … the administration to Facebook, flagging disinformation? And then there’s also some reporting that we’ve had that Facebook maybe hasn’t been as proactive as the White House would like it to be in response to some of the flags. And so is there a process of how flagging works, and then whether Facebook has been amenable to those requests?

PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re in regular touch with social media platforms, just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets about areas where we have concern, information that might be useful, information that may or may not be interesting to your viewers, you all make decisions, just like the social media platforms make decisions, even though they’re a private sector company and different, but just as an example. So we are regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies. …

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REPORTER: And then has Facebook been as proactive as the White House would like in terms of its response to those flags?

PSAKI: Well, I think, as I noted yesterday, Phil, there is more, there are more steps that everyone can take. And I would just note again, this is a responsibility of officials speaking, of course, on behalf of the government, it’s the responsibility of members of the media. It’s the responsibility of citizens and civic leaders and people who are trusted voices in communities around the country, that has a broad definition, social media platforms is one of them. And as we know, it is also, they’re are also areas where a lot of people get news and information. Sometimes those are accurate news items reported by some of your outlets or accurate information shared by a neighbor. Sometimes there is information that is not, it is hard to discriminate, as we know, this is not a new issue. But it is an issue that is impacting people’s lives. So a couple of the steps that we have, you know, that could be constructive for the public health of the country are providing for Facebook or other platforms to measure and publicly share the impact of misinformation on their platform, and the audience it’s reaching, also with the public, with all of you, to create robust enforcement strategies that bridge their properties and provide transparency about rules, you shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others, if you, for providing misinformation out there. Taking faster action against harmful posts, as you all know, information travels quite quickly. If it’s up there for days and days and days, when people see it, you know, there’s it’s hard to put that back in a box. And of course, promoting quality information algorithms. I don’t know how they work, but they all do know how they work. So those are some of the steps that we think could be constructive for public health, for public information for public and you know, the right of the public to know. Go ahead.

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THE SLEEPING GIANT

Top U.S. Official Admits – Government Will Use “Internet of Things” to Spy on the Public

Guest Post by Michael Krieger

Screen Shot 2016-02-10 at 9.56.57 AM

You can’t say you weren’t warned. The writing on the wall that “smart devices” would prove to be manna from heaven for spy agencies and hackers around the word has been obvious for a very long time.

A year ago, I published two articles on this topic. The first highlighted the revelation that Samsung’s Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party. The second had to do with the release of a high-tech Barbie that will listen to your child, record its words, send them over the internet for processing. If you missed these posts the first time around, I suggest you get up to speed:

A Very Slippery Slope – Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Can Listen to Your Private Conversations

Big Barbie is Watching You – Meet the WiFi Connected Barbie Doll that Talks to Your Children and Records Them

Moving along to today’s article, we learn that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted that the government intends to use the “Internet of Things” for spying on the public. As Trevor Timm of the Guardian notes:

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Spying on Congress and Israel: NSA Cheerleaders Discover Value of Privacy Only When Their Own Is Violated

Guest Post by Glenn Greenwald

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA under President Obama targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top aides for surveillance. In the process, the agency ended up eavesdropping on “the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups” about how to sabotage the Iran Deal. All sorts of people who spent many years cheering for and defending the NSA and its programs of mass surveillance are suddenly indignant now that they know the eavesdropping included them and their American and Israeli friends rather than just ordinary people.

The long-time GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and unyielding NSA defender Pete Hoekstra last night was truly indignant to learn of this surveillance:

Pete Hoekstra

✔ @petehoekstra

WSJ report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power.

8:17 PM – 29 Dec 2015

Pete Hoekstra

✔ @petehoekstra

NSA and Obama officials need to be investigated and prosecuted if any truth to WSJ reports. NSA loses all credibility. Scary.

8:27 PM – 29 Dec 2015

In January 2014, I debated Rep. Hoekstra about NSA spying and he could not have been more mocking and dismissive of the privacy concerns I was invoking. “Spying is a matter of fact,” he scoffed. As Andrew Krietz, the journalist who covered that debate, reported, Hoekstra “laughs at foreign governments who are shocked they’ve been spied on because they, too, gather information” — referring to anger from German and Brazilian leaders. As TechDirt noted, “Hoekstra attacked a bill called the RESTORE Act, that would have granted a tiny bit more oversight over situations where (you guessed it) the NSA was collecting information on Americans.”

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Incongruities in the News

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Jonathan Pollard, a paid spy for Israel described by Michael D. Shear as “one of the country’s most notorious spies,” has been pardoned from his life sentence. It strikes me as hypocritical for the US government to sentence anyone to prison for spying when the government itself spies on everyone everywhere. All Americans including members of the House and Senate, congressional staff, military officers, foreign governments including the leaders of Washington’s closest allies, and foreign businesses are spied upon. No one is exempt from Washington’s spying.

Washington claims that its worldwide spying does no harm. So how did the very limited spying of one person—Pollard—a civilian employee of Naval intelligence do so much harm as to warrant a life sentence? What some of us would like to see is a life sentence for NSA.

What disturbs me about the case is that it is Pollard, who spied for a foreign country, who is released. In contrast, Manning and Snowden who spied for the American people are locked away, Manning in a federal prison and Snowden in his Russian exile. Julian Assange, who merely did his job as a journalist and made available to newspapers documents leaked to him, is confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

It seems to me that if Pollard who spied for Israel can be set free, so ought to be Manning, Snowden, and Assange who spied for the American people and reported the illegal activities of the US government and the dangerous impact of Washington’s illegal activities on the liberty of Americans. Pollard is a hero to Israel, not to America, and it is Pollard who is released. Manning, Snowden, and Assange are heroes to America, and they continue to be confined.

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OUR WONDERFUL ALLY HAS NAMED A STREET FOR HIM NOT FAR FROM THE US EMBASSY IN TEL AVIV

I’m sure SSS and Llpoh can find some justification for Pollard’s crimes against us. Both of them put the US above Israel, right?

Just Punishment

Jonathan Pollard was one of the worst traitors ofthe 20th century. He deserved to languish as long as he did.

By Fred Kaplan

Jonathan Pollard, who’s been in prison the past 30 years for selling secrets to Israel, will be released on parole this November. Two things are worth noting. First, contrary to many skeptics, his release is not a political ploy to relax Israel’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. Second, contrary to claims by Pollard’s supporters, his punishment has been completely justified; he ranks as one of the 20^th century’s most appalling American spies.

FRED KAPLAN

Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War and 1959: The Year Everything Changed.

The first myth is easy to puncture. Pollard’s life sentence came with a mandatory-parole clause after 30 years. He started serving time in November 1985. So, 30 years is up in November 2015. It’s math.

The second myth takes longer to unravel. At his sentencing hearing, Pollard, who’d been a U.S. Navy intelligence official, painted himself as a devout Jew who’d stolen classified documents dealing only with Arab military might in order to help Israel stave off an invasion; none of his actions, he claimed, harmed American security.

Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. called Pollard to the bench, showed him a classified affidavit that the Department of Defense had submitted, listing the range of sensitive secrets that he’d stolen, pointed to one of the items, and said, “What about this?” Pollard was silenced. Robinson sentenced him to life.

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The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”—William Binney, NSA whistleblower

We now have a fourth branch of government.

As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

You might know this branch of government as Surveillance, but I prefer “technotyranny,” a term coined by investigative journalist James Bamford to refer to an age of technological tyranny made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.

Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s soldier cops into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.

This is about to be the new face of policing in America.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has been a perfect red herring, distracting us from the government’s broader, technology-driven campaign to render us helpless in the face of its prying eyes. In fact, long before the NSA became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

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