By Mike Huckabee
December 19, 2022
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Big Brother really needs to be put on a diet –- a starvation diet. He’s been growing fat for the past two decades, ever since 9/11, and we’re finding now that he’s much bigger than we ever knew.
So far, thanks to Elon Musk, the focus of this conversation has been on Twitter. But the same nest of swamp rats has infested Google, Yahoo and Facebook as well. As Steve Hilton reported last night on “The Next Revolution,” this shadowy network was set up by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and implemented by the FBI and other agencies “to meddle in our elections and to silence and censor Americans.”
Here’s a name you might not know: Alex Stamos, former head of cybersecurity at Yahoo, who in 2016, oversaw the largest security breach of a single company in history, a foreign hacking that affected 500 million accounts. After that, he failed upward –- well maybe laterally –- to become the security chief at Facebook, where he presided over the so-called “Russia hack” of the DNC.
In 2018, he moved to Stanford University, but, as THE NEWS YORK TIMES reported, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said they’d “continue to collaborate” with him.
Now, what did this new collaboration involve? Stamos was in a group at Stanford examining “the role of security and technology in society.” And according to what he has said –- among colleagues, but on video that the rest of us can see now –- the “vast majority” of the problems we face in our “information environment” are domestic ones.
Here’s another name that hasn’t been mentioned much till now: Chris Krebs, who around that same time was appointed director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS. (Krebs and Stamos have since gone on to form their own consulting form, KSG.) As Hilton reported, its stated mission was “to protect America against cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign countries.” But that’s not what it became, because in May 2019, DHS simply redefined foreign disinformation online as “an attack on physical infrastructure,” the same as blowing up a bridge or building, or interfering at a polling place. We now had CYBER INFRASTRUCTURE. This is the excuse they used to censor YOU, an American, because you were passing along “Russian disinformation.”
As Hilton explained it, when the Mueller investigation turned up nothing on Trump and “collusion” with Russia, which was a big fake to begin with, CISA shifted from protecting against foreign interference to countering domestic misinformation. They did this on their own, without any act of Congress to authorize it. And, yes, this started well before January 6. FBI whistleblower John Guandolo has testified under oath that it was “absurd” to think the Oath Keepers were trying to overthrow the government.
While Trump was still in office and anticipating the next election, CISA “decided that any U.S. citizen posting anything the federal government considered ‘misinformation’ was now carrying out a cyber attack against critical U.S. infrastructure.”
See how important definitions are? Whenever a word gets re-defined, watch out.
The government’s “work-around” for being able to monitor Americans on election-related communications was, and still is, a consortium we’ve discussed before, most recently last week, the Orwellian-named Election Integrity Project (EIP). This partisan group is actually there to suck every last bit of integrity out of the election process.
As Stamos explained in a June 2021 videoconference of the Atlantic Council, CISA had to put in place “the funding and the legal authorizations to go do the kinds of work that would be necessary.” They were able “to pull together, pretty quickly, a project between these four organizations to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves.”
Ah, there it is. Much of the monitoring and censorship of Americans that was illegal for the government to do, it farmed out to this consortium, which was funded through millions in federal grants (!). Of course, that was also illegal. Stamos has said they reached out and had “two-way conversations with all the major platforms...really good conversations with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit.” The goal is to identify disinformation, report it quickly and “collaborate with them on taking it down.”
Here are the four members of EIP:
–- Stanford Internet Observatory
(“ACCESS DENIED. You are not authorized to access this page.”)
–- Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public
https://ischool.uw.edu/news/
–- the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, funded mostly by the State Department
https://www.digitalsherlocks.
–- Graphika, a private social media analytics firm funded, in part, by the DoD
Graphika chillingly says, “We’re the best in the world at analyzing social networks: how they form, how they evolve, how they are manipulated.”
Of course, when COVID hit, their mission expanded to include not just election misinformation but COVID vaccine misinformation. The EIP formed the “VP” --- the Virality Project. (Good call, naming this insidious group after a virus.) As Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online reported last month, “VP ended up censoring, with its government partners, 66 unique social media narratives going viral online concerning COVID during the 2021 calendar year.”
The VP itself reported that “Facebook recently added a policy to remove accounts that are dedicated to sharing ‘personal anecdotes or new events of severe adverse events, either in hyperbolic terms or without context.” A search on FB for anti-vaccine groups would “not autocomplete, or suggest related Pages and Groups or search terms.” They also bragged that “Pinterest...only surfaces content from leading public health institutions, such as the CDC and WHO.”
We would add that there’s a similarly authoritarian social media platform called NextDoor, which ‘Huckabee’ writer Laura Ainsworth looked into months ago after being put in “jail,” that did the same thing. Any COVID information that conflicted with what the CDC was saying (at any given moment) was taken down. This was censorship at the micro level, with local neighborhood content moderators busily snooping on neighbors’ conversations, conditioning neighbors to being monitored. Twitter and Facebook are much bigger, of course, but at the time of our report, ND was a $2 billion enterprise based in San Francisco and Switzerland. So far, it’s stayed off the radar screen, but it’s there. We wonder if has been directly engaged with the FBI or if it just takes its cues from those platforms that are.
Social media even collaborated to censor esteemed doctors and scientists such as Jay Bhattacharya. Considering the very real “severe adverse events” we’re seeing in recent months –- young people dropping dead or dying in their sleep of heart failure, and the consequences to kids (and adults) of prolonged lockdowns –- one has to wonder how many deaths this censorship might have caused while the government swamp pushed its vaccine agenda. We’ll never know.
https://www.americaoutloud.
THERE MUST BE ACCOUNTABILITY for the individuals running this show, whether they’re in government themselves or taking government money to be government’s henchmen. And the FBI must be dismantled.
Hilton also interviewed incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who pointed out that the real misinformation campaign was coming from the government, directed at us. Good watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
For when you have time, this conversation between Elvis Chan, head of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, and Twitter’s Yoel Roth, as posted on Friday by Matt Taibbi, shows the pressure the FBI was putting on the platform to “find” more election disinformation. Chan was on a mission!
Similarly, the CDC was even using a secret backchannel to control the COVID narrative on Twitter.
Matt Taibbi corners California Rep. Ted Lieu about Twitter helping the FBI by geo-tracking people who hadn’t committed crimes but whose tweets the Bureau didn’t like. Taibbi had a list of specific questions for Lieu, who is on the House Judiciary Committee and “should know,” he said.
Even Elon Musk got into the conversation, saying those were “good questions.” When pressed by Musk, Lieu tweeted: “...Have you tried reading the FBI’s mission? From 2017 program:
“‘The FBI considers strategic engagement with U.S. technology companies, including threat indicator sharing, to be important in combating foreign influence actors.” Lieu is quoting from 2017; of course, we all now know that “foreign influence actors” are really mostly Americans. Lieu admits he has known about this program and is trying to defend the indefensible.
Finally, here’s a must-see interview with Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, ranking member –- soon to be chairman –- of the House Intel Committee, speaking with Maria Bartiromo on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES. He points out that the characterization of Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” was done without any intel at all. It was “outside the bounds of anything we would have expected them to do, and certainly very constitutionally troubling.”
It’s gonna get hot in our nation’s capital in January. Turner says the January 6 Kommittee “has established some GREAT legal precedent” for Congress to have “full access,” so subpoenas will fly. The ultimate goal is to find out who is at the top of all this, masterminding it. He says the FBI absolutely will be defunded and that those who collaborated with them are legally vulnerable. They also will seek the truth about the source of COVID-19, though Biden won’t even bring it up with the Chinese. He knows he won’t get ice cream if he does.
https://www.foxnews.com/
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