Big Brother using social media to crush freedom worldwide

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

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George Orwell - 1984

(WND)  -  The increasing use of social media by governments to manipulate elections and monitor citizens has resulted in a decline in global internet freedom for a ninth consecutive year, according to an annual assessment by the Washington, D.C., think tank Freedom House.

The "Freedom on the Net 2019" report found that governments in 26 countries manipulated national elections over the past year through tactics such as disinformation, blocking websites and cutting off access to the internet.

"Many governments are finding that on social media, propaganda works better than censorship," said Mike Abramowitz, president of Freedom House. "Authoritarians and populists around the globe are exploiting both human nature and computer algorithms to conquer the ballot box, running roughshod over rules designed to ensure free and fair elections."

"Freedom on the Net 2019" assesses internet freedom in 65 countries that account for 87 percent of internet users worldwide.

Freedom House said it has found evidence of advanced social media surveillance programs in at least 40 of the countries analyzed.

Governments are indiscriminately monitoring citizens' online behavior to identify perceived threats and in some cases to silence opposition, the think tank said.

"Once reserved for the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, big-data spying tools are making their way around the world," said Adrian Shahbaz, Freedom House's research director for technology and democracy. "Advances in AI are driving a booming, unregulated market for social media surveillance. Even in countries with considerable safeguards for fundamental freedoms, there are already reports of abuse."

Freedom House said that of the 65 countries assessed in its report, a record 47 featured arrests of users for political, social or religious speech.

"The future of internet freedom rests on our ability to fix social media," said Shahbaz. "Since these are mainly American platforms, the United States must be a leader in promoting transparency and accountability in the digital age. This is the only way to stop the internet from becoming a Trojan horse for tyranny and oppression."

WND.com

Communist app tells you are near someone in "debt"

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ” 
― George Orwell, 1984

(Evening Standard)  -  Google knows a lot about you: what you look like, how you sound, your favourite place to get coffee. But all that information stays within Google, it isn't handed over to the UK government, who can then use it to decide if you deserve a mortgage or can go on holiday. 

In China, things work a little differently. The country is gearing up to launch a social credit system in 2020, giving all citizens an identity number that will be linked to a permanent record.

Like a financial score, everything from paying back loans to behaviour on public transport will be included. 

Different cities and provinces have different versions of this at the moment, that will all come together in one big database, in order to keep track of everything everyone is doing. 

One aspect of this social credit system is a new app in the northern province of Hebei. According to the state-run newspaper China Daily, the Hebei-based app will alert people if there are in 500 metres of someone in debt. 

It's like being on Oxford Street and being able to work out everyone around you who was in debt. According to the financial charity, the Money Charity, the average UK household debt (including mortgages) was £58,540, in June last year.

That's a lot of notifications.  

The app name translates to “map of deadbeat debtors”, and can be accessed via WeChat, China’s most popular instant-messaging platform. The idea is that it will allow people to “whistle-blow on debtors capable of paying their debts.”

The Hebei-based app is one part of this tracking system, but this social credit scoring is already having an impact in China. According to China Daily, more than 6,000 people who failed to pay their taxes on time or misbehaved on public transport were barred from taking planes or trains in and out of China between June 2018 and January 2019. 

It’s not only this type of app that displays the Chinese future of social credit. One project, named Sesame Credit from the financial wing of the tech company Alibaba, teamed up with a matchmaking service Baihe to promote clients with good credit scores, as reported by the BBC.  

Imagine being blocked from Tinder because you hadn’t paid your student loan off yet. It’s frightening, to say the least.

Read More . . . .

Coming Soon To America

Our Masters will control our every thought and action

"Extremist" Internet Content To Be Blocked By AI

Bullshit Alert

• The so-called "Conservative" Party is using ISIS as the excuse for developing AI internet censorship . . . . ignore the fact that ISIS is virtually extinct. 
• A "Crazy Blogger" like me might suspect the government has other targets in mind for internet censorship.

(TechCrunch)  -  The UK government's pressure on tech giants to do more about online extremism just got weaponized. 

The Home Secretary has today announced a machine learning tool, developed with public money by a local AI firm, which the government says can automatically detect propaganda produced by the Islamic State terror group with "an extremely high degree of accuracy".

The technology is billed as working across different types of video-streaming and download platforms in real-time, and is intended to be integrated into the upload process -- as the government wants the majority of video propaganda to be blocked before it's uploaded to the Internet.

So yes this is content moderation via pre-filtering -- which is something the European Commission has also been pushing for. Though it's a highly controversial approach, with plenty of critics. Supporters of free speech frequently describe the concept as 'censorship machines', for instance.

Last fall the UK government said it wanted tech firms to radically shrink the time it takes them to eject extremist content from the Internet -- from an average of 36 hours to just two. It's now evident how it believes it can force tech firms to step on the gas: By commissioning its own machine learning tool to demonstrate what's possible and try to shame the industry into action.

TechCrunch understands the government acted after becoming frustrated with the response from platforms such as YouTube. It paid private sector firm, ASI Data Science, £600,000 in public funds to develop the tool -- which is billed as using "advanced machine learning" to analyze the audio and visuals of videos to "determine whether it could be Daesh propaganda".

Specifically, the Home Office is claiming the tool automatically detects 94% of Daesh propaganda with 99.995% accuracy -- which, on that specific sub-set of extremist content and assuming those figures stand up to real-world usage at scale, would give it a false positive rate of 0.005%.

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1984 is Here
kk"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."
 - - - Robert A. Heinlein
kk
Read More:
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1984 - Conservatives crack down on "hate speech"
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Freedom of Speech Rejected by Conservatives
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1984 - "Ministry of Truth" set up by government
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Communist police use smart glasses to identify "suspects"
kk
Limbaugh - Internet Giants are Stalinists

Freedom of Speech

"From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. 

It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought ...Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things."

-- Noam Chomsky(1928- ) 

American linguist and political writer

POLICE STATE Crackdown in Spain - "Democracy" in an illusion

By Gary;

The more things change the more they stay the same.

90% of Catalans voted for freedom, so the All-Powerful State beats the living crap out of the people for daring to vote in an election.

Democracy?  Just more bullshit and lies from the Elites.

The Spanish police are no different that those in any other nation or at any other time in history. They will crush whatever group their Masters tell them to crush in order to protect the status quo be it monarchy, Islamist state or Communist dictatorship.

I believe this violent police crackdown on a peaceful and free election is a Boston Tea Party moment for Catalonia.  Fence sitters on the subject of independence will now join the movement.

The Catalans, who have their own regional government based in Barcelona, have a troubled relationship with Spain, which violently stripped away their autonomy and attempted to stamp out their language during the Franco years, as well as settling hundreds of thousands of outsiders in the region to try and dilute its sense of national identity during the Franco years.

So we see Spanish riot police aggressively suppressing a self-determination referendum on independence for Catalonia, which Madrid says “runs counter to the goals and ideals of the European Union”.

There are only three options for Spain:

• Rule with the consent of the governed
• Rule with jack boots, tear gas and fear
• or grant independence.

I cannot see Spain allowing the Catalans freedom. So watch for a Police State style rule over the province and perhaps revolution.

Suffer for democracy. Police crackdown

Beating people for daring to vote

Obey Your Masters
Spanish riot police shoots rubber bullet straight
at people trying to reach a voting site.

Dr. Ron Paul Interviews Julian Assange

The Donald is on the Wrong Side

The corrupt Deep State is out to screw over 

Trump along with Assange and Snowden

(Zero Hedge)  -  Having blasted the Trump administration for their hyprocritical flip-flop from "loving WikiLeaks" to "arrest Assange," Ron Paul made his feelings very clear on what this signals: "If we allow this president to declare war on those who tell the truth, we have only ourselves to blame." 

Today he sits down with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for a live interview...

"The CIA has been deeply humiliated as a result of our ongoing publications so this is a preemptive move by the CIA to try and discredit our publications and create a new category for Wikileaks and other national security reporters to strip them of First Amendment protections,"

Julian Assange Speaks Out: The War On The Truth

Noam Chomsky: 

CIA Targeting of Julian Assange of 

WikiLeaks is "Disgraceful Act"

Porn & Political Websites Censored by Government

Lucy Liu

Frightened to Death of Freedom

• Communists in China crack down on websites with hot women like Lucy Liu or sites daring to talk about politics. Freedom is a dirty word for the Left. 

(Reuters)  -  China has shut down or "dealt with" thousands of websites for sharing "harmful" erotic or obscene content since April, the state's office for combating pornography and illegal publications announced on Thursday.

The office said 2,500 websites were prosecuted or shut down and more than 3 million "harmful" posts were deleted in eight months up to December during a drive to "purify" the internet in China and protect youth, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The government has tightening its grip on Chinese cyberspace in recent months, in particular placing new restrictions on the fast-growing live-streaming industry.

The state has a zero-tolerance approach to what it considers lewd, smutty or illegal content and has in past crackdowns removed tens of thousands of websites in a single year.

Two popular news websites were also punished for spreading "illegal" content, Xinhua reported. It did not elaborate.

Aside from live-streaming, the office worked alongside the Ministry of Public Security, the ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration of China to target cloud storage, chat apps and "vulgar" videos.

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Here in America Too

Facebook Spies on You For The Government

Conservatives Pass Most Extreme Surveillance Law in the History of Western Democracy

A Conservative Police State

• George Orwell was right that Big Brother would begin in Britain.
• Britain's so-called "Conservative" Party has pushed through yet another nightmare 1984 spy bill. You have no rights.  The state is supreme.

(Bleeping Computer)  -  The UK government passed yesterday a new sweeping cyber-surveillance that grants authorities the legal power to collect web traffic and telephone data on all UK citizens in bulk, even on people that have never committed a crime or aren't the subjects of an official investigation.

The new law, known as Snooper's Charter 2 or the Investigatory Powers Bill (IP Bill), replaces the older Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

Following public outcry, the UK government drafted the IP Bill to replace RIPA, a law that allowed the GCHQ to collect bulk data on its citizens, and which Edward Snowden unmasked following his NSA revelations.

Ironically, the IP Bill ended up being much worse than the RIPA law ever was, with regulators shoving more and more privacy-intrusive clauses inside the IP Bill, all for the sake of fighting terrorists and fighting threats on the home field.

The law passed yesterday by both UK legislative houses (the House of Commons and the House of Lords), and officials expect the Royal House to sign it into law by the end of the year.

Here is just a small list of all the new surveillance regulation included in the IP Bill's approved version:

• Internet Service Providers must log every user's web browsing history for a year.
• Police and other law enforcement agencies can access this data through a specialized interface and search for suspects or general profiles.
• Security services can access and analyze public and private databases.
• Government agencies can still collect communications data in bulk, just like through RIPA.
• Police and other law enforcement agencies can, under certain circumstances, hack into users' devices.
• Communications operators must remove their side of encryption and help state agencies access data or devices.

For the past years, human rights groups, tech companies, politicians, and regular UK citizens have criticized the new law, which grants the UK government the same powers Chinese authorities have.

Amnesty International, Open Democracy, Open Rights Group and Privacy International have heavily criticized the IP Bill version approved by the UK government.

Read More . . . .

How the Government Tracks You

Obama: Forget ISIS, We’re Going After ‘Anti-Government’ Americans!

Obama:

"You are the enemy, not ISIS."

(CNN)  -  Domestic terror groups pose a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda, a Justice Department official said Wednesday.

To help combat them, the department has created a new counsel that will coordinate the investigation and prosecution of anti-government and hate groups.

Assistant Attorney General John Carlin, who oversees national security at the Justice Department, announced the new position -- the Domestic Terrorism Counsel -- following a number of violent attacks or plots against the U.S. that he said were motivated by "anti-government views, racism, bigotry and anarchy, and other despicable beliefs."

More Americans have died at the hands of domestic terror than the international terror groups that federal law enforcement focuses so much attention on, Carlin said, pointing to such high-profile attacks as the racially motivated Charleston church shooting in June or the murder of two Las Vegas police officers by anti-government extremists last year.

"Looking back over the past few years, it is clear that domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists remain a real and present danger to the United States," he said. "We recognize that, over the past few years, more people have died in this country in attacks by domestic extremists than in attacks associated with international terrorist groups."

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Facebook to censor your posts on immigration

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is
the merger of state and corporate power."
Benito Mussolini

Thought Criminal

Zuckerberg to make sure that only government 

approved thoughts are posted on the Internet.

(Infowars News)  -  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught discussing the censorship of anti-migrant posts at the United Nations development summit Saturday while speaking with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to CNBC, the pair were picked up by a hot mic after Merkel confronted Zuckerberg on social media posts critical of “the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany.”

After being asked about Facebook’s efforts to curtail speech, Zuckerberg stated, “We need to do some work,” confirming he’d already started looking at ways to hinder comments in opposition to Merkel’s immigration stance.

“Are you working on this?” Merkel asked. “Yeah,” Zuckerberg responded before their microphone was cut.

In response to the shocking revelation, media outlets such as Bloomberg immediately leapt to the defense of the tech giant, insinuating that any critique of the German government’s response to the migrant crisis would be “racist” and “xenophobic.”

Only just last week, an article by Infowars’ Kit Daniels examining the pope’s controversial comments on mass immigration was pulled and barred from Facebook without explanation.

Since the migrant crisis began, news outlets across the globe have both covered up crucial facts, specifically NATO’s responsibility in destabilizing Syria, and gone out of their way to outright ignore any stories that highlight the criminal acts of migrants.

Zuckerberg’s penchant for censoring speech deemed politically incorrect is unsurprising given his meeting late last year with Lu Wei, the czar of China’s authoritarian Internet censorship system.

Read More . . . .

5 Things the Media Won't Report About the Refugee Crisis

Chomsky: Obama ‘Determined To Demolish The Foundations Of Our Civil Liberties’

And the GOP is at Obama's side

• It is great that Chomsky has principals and attacks Dear Leader.  But keep in mind that a GOP President backed by a "small government" GOP Congress created this 1984 Orwellian nightmare, and they eagerly fund the spy programs to this day.

(The Daily Caller)  -  Progressive hero Noam Chomsky is terrified of the surveillance state that has developed during the tenure of President Barack Obama, calling it a grave threat to our fundamental civil liberties.

In a column published Monday, Chomsky writes that the documents revealed to the public by Edward Snowden show a system that is flagrantly violating the principles of the Constitution.

“It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ and guarantees the privacy of their persons, houses, papers and effects,” Chomsky said.

“Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden documents.”

The scope and depth of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program is what particularly troubles the retired MIT professor and leads him to conclude that our current president is set on undermining the foundations of our society.

“The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus — in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society,” Chomsky wrote. “As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might be sent to President Obama’s huge and expanding databases in Utah.”

“In other ways too, the constitutional lawyer in the White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of our civil liberties. The principle of the presumption of innocence, which dates back to Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.”

All this adds up to a system that George Orwell would’ve been incapable of envisioning as “Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.”

And like the totalitarian government in “1984,” this apparatus is designed — in Chomsky’s opinion — to defend state power from the threat of an unruly domestic population and make transparency a one-way street between the government and its private citizens.

“Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim,” the professor concludes. “In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.”

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NSA Whistleblower Willing To
Die For The Truth

36-year NSA veteran turned whistleblower Kirk Wiebe joins the show today to break down passage of the USA Freedom Act and the termination of the NSA's bulk data collection program. 

FBI admits it hasn't cracked single terror case with Patriot Act snooping power

Big Brother is Incompetent

• For some strange reason all of this unconstitutional spying did not prevent 9-11, the Fort Hood massacre, the Boston Bombing or the Pamela Geller Cartoon attack.
• There are two possible explanations:  #1) The government is run by incompetent idiots or #2) Terrorists are not the real target of government spying.  Pick one.

(Washington Times)  -  FBI agents can’t point to any major terrorism cases they’ve cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law operating.

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations.

The new report adds ammunition to those opponents, with the inspector general concluding that no major cases have been broken by use of the Patriot Act’s records-snooping provisions.

“The agents we interviewed did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders,” the inspector general concluded — though he said agents did view the material they gathered as “valuable” in developing other leads or corroborating information.

Increasingly, that meant scooping up information on those who were not targets of a terrorism investigation.

Read More . . . . 

Former NSA Head Exposes Agency's Real Crimes

William Binney, a legendary NSA mathematician developed the revolutionary logic and architecture that is now used to spy on everybody in the world. When the NSA decided to use his programs on US citizens he became one of the biggest whistleblowers in the history of the NSA. He started the debate and the avalanche of understanding in regards to illegal surveillance, and is revealing inside knowledge on some of the biggest government secrets to date.

Importing Muslim Terror

It is our official policy (as passed by Congress) to deliberately import Muslims into the U.S. from regions exploding with Islamic terrorism.  The Tsarnaev brothers came from Russia's war torn province of Chechnya.  The Russians even gave us a heads up about the family, and nothing was done.

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My theory is the government wants terror attacks to use as an excuse to grow the 1984 Big Brother Surveillance Police State.

Obama to control how long you spend in the shower

The 1984 Police State

Big Brother says you are spending too 

much time in the shower

(Washington Free Beacon)  -  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants hotels to monitor how much time its guests spend in the shower.

The agency is spending $15,000 to create a wireless system that will track how much water a hotel guest uses to get them to “modify their behavior.”

“Hotels consume a significant amount of water in the U.S. and around the world,” an EPA grant to the University of Tulsa reads. “Most hotels do not monitor individual guest water usage and as a result, millions of gallons of potable water are wasted every year by hotel guests.”

“The proposed work aims to develop a novel low cost wireless device for monitoring water use from hotel guest room showers,” it said. “This device will be designed to fit most new and existing hotel shower fixtures and will wirelessly transmit hotel guest water usage data to a central hotel accounting system.”

The funding is going toward creating a prototype and market analysis for the device. The goal of the project is to change the behavior of Americans when they stay at hotels.

“This technology will provide hotel guests with the ability to monitor their daily water online or using a smartphone app and will assist hotel guest in modifying their behavior to help conserve water,” the grant said.

The project was filed under “Water conservation,” “Urban water planning,” and “Sustainable water management.”

The EPA also has a WaterSense program that challenges hotels to track their water use and upgrade their restrooms with low-flow toilets and showerheads.

The program also encourages “linen and towel reuse programs” in guest rooms.

The EPA is concerned that the average shower, which lasts just eight minutes, uses 18 gallons of water, and has asked Americans to reduce their shower length by at least one minute.

Tyler W. Johannes, Ph.D., an associate professor in the University of Tulsa’s School of Chemical Engineering who is working on the project, told the Washington Free Beacon that the researchers hope to see the technology “adopted by all major hotels and used across the country.”

He said the device seeks to get hotel guests to limit their showers to seven minutes as a start.  Johannes and his team assumed the average hotel shower lasts 8.2 minutes, using 17.2 gallons of water per guest per shower.

“Initially our device/app seeks to get hotel guests to reduce their water use by 10 percent or to reduce their showers by about one minute,” he said.

Johannes provided a link to Home Water Works, which recommends taking a five minute shower to reduce water use.

The website, which is a project of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, also suggests watering plants with discarded cold water from showers that take a long time to heat up, and taking “navy showers.”

“The method requires three steps: 1) turn on water to rinse body and hair; 2) turn off water while shampooing hair and washing body with soap and washcloth; 3) resume water flow and rinse off all shampoo and soap,” the group said. “Using this technique, the total duration of water flow can easily be reduced to 5 minutes or less.”

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