Nov 242023
 

Sept 2023:  NCI

https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/    Have you seen it?  It’s a bit of a bombshell.  Hallelujah!   But it won’t achieve its potential without us pushing it out, hard.

In addition to listening to the PRESS CONFERENCE  (at the bottom of https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/commissioners-report/),  I listened to the testimony of Shawn Buckley.  It’s a fuse in the powder keg – – covid vaccines “Not Safe and Not Effective”.

– – – – – –  – – – – –

Nov 2023.  More, NCI:

Rodney Palmer spoke to the crowd on Nov 18th, Calgary, Rebel News event.  Impressive presentation.  I wanted to hear more from this retired journalist.

As serendipity would have it, Mr. Palmer stayed at the same hotel as myself.  I ran into him as he was leaving to catch a flight.

Rodney’s “life changed”  after his testimony to the NCI was uploaded and went viral.   His expertise is in great demand as a speaker and consultant.

Rodney Palmer is an award-winning journalist who has worked for 20 years as a foreign correspondent for CTV news and investigative reporter for CBC Radio & Television in Canada and abroad. He was the CTV News Foreign Correspondent and Bureau Chief in India, China, and the Middle East

Rodney’s explosive testimony during the NCI Toronto hearing on day 1 provided evidence as to how CBC in particular is not conducting newsgathering, they are focusing on propaganda.

I listened to his NCI testimony.  Palmer is a professional.  His experience is valuable.  Thanks to someone on the internet:  I would say the following paragraph is accurate, adding that Rodney Palmer “tells” of instances using pictures captured at the time.  I recognize some of the pictures from live coverage of the Freedom Convoy.

Mr. Rodney Palmer reports of how he was in Beijing when SARS broke out and how COVID was dealt with very differently. In chronological order, the systematic propaganda inflicted on Canadians by the CBC, regarding the safety of vaccines. He tells of many instances of the CBC journalists and newscasters lying to the public on their various broadcasts of news and other shows.

From the brief one-on-one encounter I (Sandra) had with Rodney Palmer,  I would say that his experience as a foreign correspondent helped equip him to understand the current dangerous state of governance in Canada.  Rodney and others like him who understand have jumped in and are tireless.  They are urgent soldiers.

They need us to play our role:   TALK!  tell others.  We are not going to get through this any other way.

I spoke with a 40-year-old Somalian man who was a child during the Civil War in Somalia.  He knew exactly the problem with staying in our silos:  Too many second and third generation Canadians are comfortable.  They have never experienced or don’t know a family history of living under tyranny, let alone in poverty.  Many are poorly educated about Governance.   The Freedom Convoy brought people from all ethnicities together in unified purpose.   People who know and understand the value and fragility of freedom.  To me, Freedom is a sacred gift to be studied, cherished and protected by the community.

From a friend regarding Rodney Palmer:

This is extraordinary information everyone needs to see!

National Citizens Inquiry [into Canada’s response into Covid-19]

https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/ [on Rumble, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok]

You have to be able to face the truth, and that’s the first thing we need to do is we need to tell the truth. People who think–who are suspicious or cynical about what’s happening, they haven’t watched the testimonies.”

Rodney Palmer, Former News Journalist: “The CBC is a public news entity.  We pay for it. They broadcast on the public airwaves, and we trust them to tell the truth, because they’ve done it for 50 or 60 years…The government rollout of the vaccines was impossible without the collaboration of the CBC…And in a moment of exception, you could say, “Okay, we’re going to let the CBC be the public health system right now, but the emergency’s over, and the exception still exists…Bad journalism is incompetence, but propaganda is a betrayal, and that’s what CBC’s done. It’s betrayed us all.”

= = = = = = = = =

(Sandra):    With many thanks to my friend Lizzy.  Rodney Palmer’s presentation to the NCI:

CBC logo | Information Technology Association of Canada

1.    Introduction and Background

2.    Testimony from Former CBC Journalists:

a.     Rodney Palmer: CBC Covid-19 reporting influenced by US disinformation agency, First Draft

b.    Rodney Palmer: CBC Covid-19 reporting was guided by the Trusted News Initiative

c.     Rodney Palmer: CBC reporting on “Anti-vaxxers”

d.    Rodney Palmer: CBC Covid reporting on Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine

e.     Former CBC Fifth Estate anchor Trish Wood Podcast with Rodney Palmer

f.      Two other former CBC journalists resign in protest against the superficial controlled agenda of their once beloved institution

3.    Crisis:  Too Many Canadians Want the CBC De-funded

4.    How the CBC is Administered and Funded

5.    Fixing the CBC

 

Introduction and Background

(This would be Lizzy speaking.  I don’t know how much of the following is her research.  She is a dedicated researcher and good at it.):  In early April, 2023, I witnessed testimony from Rodney Palmer,[1] a former CBC journalist to the National Citizens Inquiry on Canada’s Covid-19 response.[2]

This in-depth testimony shocked me to the core.  I marvelled, realizing that this disturbing evidence will rewrite the history of Canada’s Covid-19 response for years to come. Something serious had changed at the CBC.

Longtime Canadian journalist calls out mainstream media for pushing ...

To start with some background, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1936, is a crown corporation that currently reports to the Minister of Canadian Heritage in Canada’s Liberal Government. Its CEO, Canadian-born Catherine Tait, who is married to an American living in NYC, [3] and who illegally contributed[4] to Hilary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign,[5] was appointed on April, 3, 2018 to lead the CBC into the digital age.[6] [7]

On September 9, 2019, the CBC under Ms. Tait joined the Trusted News Charter.

“The Trusted News Charter is a BBC-led initiative to strengthen measures to protect audiences from disinformation. The Charter is the result of the June 2019 Trusted News Summit and includes a commitment to collaborate on source authentication, civic information, media education, and other responses to disinformation.  Other partners just announced include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, AFP, Reuters, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the European Broadcasting Union.”[8]

Said Tait, “Disinformation is a global challenge. We need global solutions. Joining the Trusted News Charter is an important part of our ongoing work to ensure Canadians have access to trusted sources of news and information.”[9]

The following day, September 10, 2019, with Catherine Tait as its chair, [10] the Global Task Force for Public Media was formed to develop a consensus and “single strong voice” around the issues and challenges facing public media worldwide.[11]  But as Palmer points out, his own job with CBC for a decade was:

“to elevate the voices of Canadians on Canadian stories, to unite our vast country, and make us all feel as one…This is a bizarre conglomerate of public broadcasters…who all have national mandates like the CBC to unite their own people.”

He added – significantly – that the public broadcasters cannot be easily bought, because they have no advertisers, “so something else was done here.”

© Rodney Palmer slide

When the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 pandemic on March, 11, 2020, the Trusted News Charter, now called the Trusted News Initiative, had added the American disinformation agency, First Draft:

“Starting today, partners in the Trusted News Initiative will alert each other to disinformation about coronavirus, including ‘imposter content’ purporting to come from trusted sources. Such content will be reviewed promptly to ensure that disinformation is not republished…The Trusted News Initiative partners are: BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, AFP, Reuters, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), The Hindu, First Draft, and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.”[12]

Interestingly, another disinformation organization, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) had unveiled the Journalism Trust Initiative in Paris on April 3, 2018, the same day that Catherine Tait was appointed CEO of the CBC:

“An innovative media self-regulatory initiative designed to combat disinformation online – called the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) – was launched today by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and its partners Agence France Presse (AFP), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Global Editors Network (GEN).”[13]

Throughout her tenure, Ms. Tait (who had been living in the United States) has been controversial, if not naïve about her CBC function. Traditionally, Canadian crown corporation CEOs never enter partisan politics, a role that Ms. Tait failed to understand by entering a dispute with the Conservative Party of Canada’s Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre in February, 2023.[14]

CEO Catherine Tait (https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2023/cbc-president-catherine-tait-is-out-of-her-lane/)

Testimony From Former CBC Journalists

a) Rodney Palmer:  CBC Covid-19 policy influenced by US disinformation agency, First Draft 

Rodney Palmer is an award-winning Canadian journalist who worked for 20 years as a foreign correspondent for CTV news, and as a producer and investigative reporter for CBC Radio & Television in Canada and abroad. He was also a general assignment reporter for the Globe and Mail, and a daily news reporter for the Vancouver Sun.

Palmer was also the CTV News Foreign Correspondent and Bureau Chief in India, Israel, and China – and was in China when SARS-Cov-1 broke out in 2002. He was in Beijing when SARS-Cov-2 hit the airwaves in 2020.[15]

Palmer’s testimony (and remarkable slide show) to the April 2023 National Citizens Inquiry[16] begins:

I lived in Beijing and worked for CTV News every day and that was when the SARS epidemic broke out, so I followed it extremely carefully. I went to weekly briefings with the World Health Organization, and with the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

I had experience with epidemics and pandemics when COVID started, and I started noticing that it was extremely different. When they shut down Wuhan I knew that it was very, very different. This was something that had not occurred before.

I started noticing something different was happening at the CBC. The CBC is a public entity. We pay for it. It broadcasts on the public airwaves. And we expect them to tell us the truth because they’ve done that for fifty or sixty years.

I noticed something very different about a couple weeks into the emergency. There was a story on The National by Adrienne Arsenault, one of the greatest broadcasters we have – a national treasure…On April 4, 2020, I saw a piece where she’s looking at her phone and she says, “what do you do if somebody sends you a text, say your father, and he thinks the virus was manufactured by China?”

Then she went to an expert guest who said, “don’t embarrass your father, you’ll just push him away. You’ve got to bring him in, kind of convince him.”

The expert witness was from an organization called First Draft, and she simply says they’re a non-profit that helps people navigate misinformation in the media.

Looking into US-based First Draft, Palmer discovered that CBC’s Marketplace had a First Draft story about anti-vaccination websites and how they make their money – and realized that “this First Draft group is now feeding the CBC their stories.”

(Myself, looking yet further into First Draft, I discovered that in June 2022 it moved its disinformation mission to the Brown University School of Public Health, which operates under the deanship of Dr. Ashish Jha.[17]

Ashish Jha is a notorious pharma-friendly media darling who publicly scorned the 2020 Senate testimony of three prominent physicians reporting the medical literature on early Covid treatments including hydroxychloroquine.  Jha’s New York Times op-ed rampage was titled “The Snake-Oil Salesmen of the Senate.”[18] By April, 2023, Jha, on temporary assignment to the White House as its Covid-19 response coordinator, was still inflicting the Covid vaccine boosters upon America’s youth.[19])

Back to Palmer pursuing the CBC’s treatment of any father who might think Covid was a lab leak:

FBI chief, Christopher Wray says the China lab leak was most likely. The quote is, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.”

So the CBC had no evidence that it wasn’t. But they wanted you to believe that it wasn’t.

There’s a definition in the Oxford dictionary of “newsgathering,” which is “the process of doing research on news items, especially ones that will be broadcast on television or printed in a newspaper.” Now how much research was done by the CBC to determine ten days after the emergency that it didn’t happen in a lab?

Another definition here is “propaganda,” which is “Persuasive mass communication that filters and frames the issues of the day in a way that strongly favours particular interests, usually those of a government or a corporation.  Also, the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies and half-truths, and the selective retelling of history.” This is what was going on in that piece. That’s why it felt so wrong to me, because there was no news involved. There was only propaganda.

What the Washington Post did with its lab leak story, ten days after the CBC said it wasn’t from the lab, was newsgathering. It was investigative reporting. What the CBC did, when it said don’t trust your family if it thinks it came from a lab, was propaganda.

 

© Rodney Palmer slide
© Rodney Palmer slide

In other words, trust the hidden agencies guiding our tax-supported CBC – even over your own father.

In another CBC propaganda example cited by Palmer, Marilyn Gladu, a Conservative Member of Parliament, was one of 15-30 MP’s who opposed vaccination as a requirement for representing their constituencies in Parliament. CBC’s Katie Simpson (who Palmer has long admired) “beat the hell out of Gladu” on the air for risking public safety by “giving support to the anti-vaxxers.”

Palmer concludes that in framing her guest on the show – and in fact all unvaccinated Canadians – as “dangers to public safety,” Katie Simpson “had no evidence and still has no evidence that anyone who isn’t vaccinated is more likely to spread COVID than a vaccinated person. This was not newsgathering. She was practising propaganda.”[20]

More anti-vax propaganda is revealed in a Palmer slide – showing CBC’s shallow, disrespectful attitude towards public knowledge and intelligence.  CBC suppressed one side of the story, because it wasn’t newsgathering; it was propaganda.

© Rodney Palmer slide

There is only one CBC perspective below on people who are allegedly “hesitant” (too weak and indecisive) to take the untested mRNA vaccines – rather than having come to a firm decision based on their own responsible research:

© Rodney Palmer slide

 

b) Rodney Palmer:  CBC Covid-19 policy was guided by the Trusted News Initiative

Two weeks after WHO announced the Covid-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, Canada’s CBC reported that the Trusted News Initiative had announced plans “to tackle harmful coronavirus disinformation.”

The TNI then agreed to engage with a new verification technology called Project Origin, led by a coalition of the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft and The New York Times – with an eerie mandate to identify non-authorized news stories for suppression.

In July, 2020, Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer for the compliant Microsoft, remarked about authorizing the news: “We’ve forged a close relationship with the BBC and other partners on Project Origin, aimed at methods and standards for end-to-end authentication of news and information.”[21]

More dangerously fascist-leaning, Microsoft announced in February, 2021 that they “and the BBC have teamed up with Adobe, Arm, Intel and Truepic to create the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). The C2PA is a standards-setting body that will develop an end-to-end open standard and technical specifications on content provenance and authentication. The standards will draw from two implementation efforts: Project Origin’s (Origin) efforts on provenance for news publishing and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which focuses on digital content attribution.”[22]

The CBC throughout was placing a strong emphasis on itself as a trusted news source.

© Rodney Palmer slide

Two years later, reports Mr. Palmer, in January 2023, Catherine Tait was still giving speeches on trusting the CBC, including one at Simon Fraser University.

“The first word out of her mouth was ‘trust’. ‘Trust seems to be in short supply.’ The next phrase is: ‘Disinformation, conspiracy theories, YouTube rabbit hole.’ This is the trusted news initiative mantra…”[23]

 

© Rodney Palmer slide

On March 29, 2021, adds Palmer, well-known CBC Toronto Radio host Matt Galloway had interviewed an expert guest from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.  The expert declared that “people who are recommending intravenous Vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide nebulization are hate” – and claimed that this was “literally inhaling bleach.”

“He lied that it was inhaling bleach,” said Palmer.  Why did Matt Galloway let this man lie on the radio?

The “expert” added, “anti-vaccine misinformation is hate.”  He then went on CBC’s “we’ve got your back” Marketplace, who took hate to the next level of censorship:

© Rodney Palmer slide

Why are social media comments the business of CBC Marketplace, who like the Prime Minister, “has got our backs”? What is the “something else” that is going on?

c) Rodney Palmer: CBC Policy on “anti-vaxxers”

Palmer reports that the CBC, very successfully, has promoted a new group of Canadians and fomented hate against them.  But the CBC does not tell us who these “anti-vaxxers” are, or what they believe.  “Do they need to have mental correction?  Psychological retraining?”

d) Rodney Palmer: CBC Covid-19 Policy on Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine

Perhaps the worst crime of the Covid-19 event was the suppression of cheap, highly proven early treatments, which were well understood back in 2020-21 – via the most downloaded article in the history of the American Journal of Medicine.[24]

In an act of unconscionable propaganda, the CBC lied about this – one reason why many Canadians would now like to see it de-funded.

Mr. Palmer’s two slides say it all:

 

Importantly, Ivermectin is particularly effective against viruses:

© Rodney Palmer slide

And yet the CBC has been persecuting Canadian physicians such as Daniel Nagase and Charles Hoffe for prescribing Ivermectin, which is on the WHO List of Essential Medicines for human beings (lower right corner).

 

e) Former CBC Fifth Estate anchor Trish Wood Podcast with Rodney Palmer

When Trish Wood heard the Rodney Palmer testimony, she tweeted:

“As a former CBC journalist, watching Rodney Palmer’s evidence about the corp’s fall into absolute corruption was heartbreaking. I knew every word was true but he was so eloquent – I was broken-hearted about my old profession, yet again.  Bravo to the #NCI  @Inquiry_Canada.”[25]

Ms. Wood also conducted a fascinating follow-up 90-minute podcast with Mr. Palmer, where both lament the tragic lapse in standards currently plaguing the CBC.[26]

Journalist Trish Wood, former anchor CBC “Fifth Estate”

This podcast is exceptional — probably historic – and includes a third journalist, Marianne Klowak, who also resigned from the CBC because of its lying. They leave no stone unturned showing how CBC Covid-19 reports cheated by following orders from above.

Most dramatic was their bombshell proof (in hour 2) that the Nazi flag unfurled during the Ottawa Freedom convoy was digitally traced back to a Liberal – who had thus enabled Prime Minister Trudeau to equate the truckers[27] with Nazis, and to refuse to talk to them.

© Rodney Palmer slide

(A 23-minute condensed version of Rodney Palmer’s NCI propaganda testimony provides special impact on the corrupt CBC under the Trudeau government):

 

f. Two career CBC journalists resign in protest against the superficial agenda of their once beloved institution

Marianne Klowak had a long career at CBC, in radio, TV and digital. It was a job she loved with colleagues she respected. But then Covid-19 hit and it seemed the journalistic rules changed overnight. After a fruitless struggle to report events she thought important, Marianne resigned.[28]

Resigning CBC journalist Marianne Klowak

From the Western Standard:

Winnipeg-born Klowak, a 32-year general reporter with the CBC and former teacher, said her “last year and a half…was a real fight” to get the truth out during the pandemic.

“It was no longer a place I recognized and I tried to push through a number of stories that were censored and cancelled,” she said.

Klowak said she felt like the CBC was “no longer committed to truth and honesty” and said the culture she was seeing develop was “disturbing.”

She said it was in June 2021 when she started to notice a “real change” with the public broadcaster during the pandemic.

“What I was seeing unfold at the CBC was you were very quickly shutting down one side of the debate, and for me that was alarming,” she said, pointing to news at the time surfacing out of Israel linking the vaccines to heart inflammation.[29]

Veteran CBC radio and CBC producer Tara Henley perhaps says it best.  In a January 2022 editorial to the National Post, titled “Why I quite the CBC,” Henley explains:  “People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported.” [30]

She adds:

When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media.

Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the “woke” worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.[31]

Could this US Ivy League bias exist because the Trudeau-appointed Catherine Tait was living with her American husband in New York City until July, 2018 (and needed to become a Canadian resident to work legally as CBC’s CEO?)

Henley continues:

To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people…

It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate.

It is to consent to the Idea that a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful. That the big issues of our time are all already settled.

It is to capitulate to certainty, to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity. To keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat.[32]

So in 2013, the CBC was still producing some of the best journalism in the country?

It now appears that after the Trudeau government came to power in October 2015, and more particularly since Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, the CBC’s content has sunk into a pap diet of diversions and distractions from the truth.

Much of the Canadian public, not about to be dumbed-down, has voted with its feet.[33]

3. Crisis:  Too Many Canadians Want the CBC De-funded

The CBC’s editorial independence was enshrined under Canada’s Broadcasting Act in 1936. CBC and Radio-Canada’s mandate was, in part, to “inform, enlighten and entertain; to contribute to the development of a shared national consciousness and identity.”

However:

A national survey of 1,200 people conducted in April 2023 by Abacus Data suggested that 40 per cent of adult Canadians agreed that the CBC was propaganda on behalf of the federal government. The majority holding that view identified themselves as Conservative voters.

Forty-five per cent of respondents said they thought the CBC should be shut down to save taxpayer money, while the rest agreed with the statement: “I value the CBC and want it maintained.” The figures matched results of an earlier survey in September 2022, by Mainstreet Research, which found that 46 per cent of Canadians wanted to see the CBC defunded.[34]

An Ipsos-Reid poll released back on May 14, 2004 had shown that Canadians felt the CBC was doing a good job protecting Canadian culture and identity, and 85% of voters would support political parties that fostered domestic ownership of broadcasting.[35]

A Nanos Research poll from August 2014 conducted for Asper Media (National Post, Financial Post) showed 41% of Canadians wanted funding increased, 46% wanted it maintained at current levels, and only 10% wanted to see it cut.[36]

A year later the Trudeau government was elected.

CBC has received $1.2 billion annually from the federal government since fiscal year 2018. Government funding increased to almost $1.4 billion for 2020-2021 to cover ‘retroactive salary inflation’ and potential issues arising from the pandemic. It returned to $1.2 billion the following year.[37]

“When considered in terms of daily life in Canada, the funding received from Parliament by CBC for its operations has decreased 54%, from 14 cents per person per day in 1985, to 6 cents per person per day in 2019.”  [Reference: “New study traces history of CBC’s public funding,” 4 February 2020 (https://cartt.ca/new-study-traces-history-of-cbcs-public-funding/); also, https://frpc.net//wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Public-funding-of-CBC-operations-2020-4-February.pdf].

In a 2020 study, “on a per-capita basis the CBC received $33, while the average for the 20 countries covered in the study was $88 — more than two and a half times greater. Funding for public broadcasting in the U.K. was $104 per capita, for Sweden $120 and for Germany $149.” The Trudeau government has done nothing to keep its 2015 election campaign to reverse the Mulroney, Chrétien, and Harper government cuts.[38]

 

How the CBC is Administered and Funded

The CBC is a Crown corporation owned and funded by the Government of Canada. It is accountable to Parliament through the minister responsible. The minister responsible, with approval of the federal cabinet, appoints the corporation’s board of directors, and the cabinet appoints the CEO and determines the rate of pay. The board and Members of Parliament have some input into the appointment of CEOs and board chairs, but the government makes the ultimate decision. The government can intervene in the management of a Crown corporation by having the minister responsible issue a directive to the board of directors ordering them to take a specific action.[39]

Fixing the CBC

If the resigning journalists are correct, we are not likely to find out how to fix the CBC from the CBC itself.

Mr. Palmer noted above that because CBC Radio does not have advertising, “something else is being done here” between the public media agencies of several countries – hinting that the international quest for a “single strong voice” against misinformation, pursued by the Global Task Force for Public Media under chairperson Catherine Tait, is overshadowing the traditional editorially-independent CBC role “of elevating the voices of Canadians on Canadian stories, to unite our vast country, and make us all feel as one.”

This “something else” — to standardize one-voice media — is what Canadians need to understand before their long-beloved public broadcaster is dismantled by 46% popular demand.

Ms. Henley said that to work at the CBC now “is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people.”

That it is “to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate.”

Judging by the composition of the 12-member Liberal Cabinet-appointed board of directors – of whom three have truth and reconciliation backgrounds; three have corporate media backgrounds; three have digital technology expertise; and only three have cultural backgrounds – this is not surprising.[40]

CBC’s board of directors does not choose the CBC president. And the board cannot dismiss the president. The prime minister chooses the president. This is not a new development; it goes back to 1936. In contrast, the director-general of the BBC is chosen by the BBC’s trustees, and those trustees can fire their director-general.[41]

It seems clear from the above that the CBC has been captured, not only by identity politics, but by combined government and corporate agendas, almost certainly influenced by the private-public World Economic Forum and its proud young national graduates – the WEF’s “young global leaders” – with Justin Trudeau among them.

Can the CBC still perform as a national unifying force?

The CBC’s legislated role “to contribute to the development of a shared national consciousness and identity” is being destroyed by identity-politics.  This is partly a result of the rise of post-modernism in communication theory and journalism schools.

Post-modernism is a late twentieth-century form of subjectivism that makes it impossible to have serious rational discussions and work towards common ground.  This trend is partly what is preventing the CBC from performing as a national unifying force.

Some steps that may be taken:

1.    CBC policy-makers need to acknowledge that they are failing in their shared-identity mandate and commit to doing better

2.    CBC accountability for violating journalistic ethics and standards should be enforced by a new, provincially-elected citizen oversight board

3.    Governments have appointed poor CBC leaders over recent years. Leaders need to be chosen with elected citizen oversight according to the priorities of its legislated mandate.

4.    Identity politics has taken a divisive turn.  Cultural pluralism should be a point of pride for all Canadians, not a cudgel to use against select groups. (This may require a public inquiry in which everyone is heard.)

5.    The societal problem of post-modernism should be addressed in serious discussions, working towards common ground for all Canadians.[42]

Conclusion

The online-digital role of CBC’s US-import Catherine Tait will expire in July of 2023. Tait has appointed 6 members of her 7-member executive team and all but one came from the corporate world. (Marco Dubé is the only journalist who rose through the CBC ranks.)[43]

Indeed, Tait has filled the CBC with a new breed of journalists, causing some of the ethically best and brightest to resign. The CBC as we have known it for decades is in a state of collapse.

CBC Logo | Symbol, History, PNG (3840*2160)

As columnist Terry Glavin has put it:

In the decades following its inception, the whole point of the CBC was to provide an informative, welcoming, entertaining and unifying place on the airwaves outside the raucous cacophony of the American mass media. It was to be a place where Canadians could get to know one another and to know about their country. And it did a pretty good job of it.

But now, the CBC brass has rebranded the organization along lines that blend seamlessly with the faddish haute-bourgeois obsessions the Trudeau Liberals’ have drawn straight from the culture wars that have so enfeebled the United States.

Rather than provide a place where Canadians can have their own conversations, the CBC’s $436,000-a-year CEO Catherine Tait (and her whiter-than-white board of governors and her seven vice-presidents, ten directors-general, her $900,000-a-year “strategic intelligence department” and her 143 executive directors) joined forces with the Trudeau Liberals in a multi-year funding package to mainline those American toxins straight into the bloodstream of Canadian culture.

What’s new here is a weird sensibility that masquerades as “progressive” that’s a perfect fit with Trudeau’s self-professed determination to remodel Canada as a “post-national” country with “no core identity” and “no mainstream.” It’s a radical experiment born from the luxury of living under the American security umbrella and immense natural-resource wealth and the sacrifices of Canadians whose struggles it has become decidedly unfashionable to even remember.

What unites and binds the Trudeau Liberals with the CBC brass – and for that matter, with the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and so on – is a mutually-reinforcing ideational package. . . please don’t make me say “woke.” What the hell, I said it. You know what I mean.

What I mean is an epistemology that supplants and replaces systems of knowledge and truth-seeking with rigidly-enforced systems of belief and ideology that purport to be “progressive.” It’s a phenomenon that is fatally corrosive to the disciplines we’ve always relied upon, in conversations and arguments among and between people of the “left” and the “right,” to establish broad societal agreement about what constitutes the truth.[44]

In other words, what we have now is a case of post-modern irrationality.

And the polls are suggesting that it’s time for a complete overhaul.

If the CBC if it is to continue as a government-funded entity, a new legislated commitment must be made to the Canadian people.

The board of directors clearly needs to be reviewed.

A citizen oversight board with an elected representative from every province should be established to meet regularly at specified intervals, and to appoint future CBC boards of directors.

CBC funding has stagnated for decades. Its funding should be supplied by a television licence fee (like the BBC) and not be subject to the policy and content influences of advertising.

A proposal outlining the essential steps for a CBC overhaul, and a restoration of its 1985 per capita funding, should be submitted formally to the Canadian people for input – and then to Parliament for approval.


[1] I am grateful to Mr. Palmer for his excellent slides, some of which I have incorporated into this essay, with acknowledgments to him. (https://rumble.com/v2fs7u2-rodney-palmer-full-interview-day-1-toronto-national-citizens-inquiry.html).

[2] “A Citizen-Led Inquiry into Canada’s COVID-19 Response. Canada’s federal and provincial governments’ COVID-19 policies were unprecedented…These interventions into Canadians’ lives, our families, businesses, and communities were, and to great extent remain, significant. In particular, these interventions impacted the physical and mental health, civil liberties and fundamental freedoms, jobs and livelihoods, and overall social and economic well-being of nearly all Canadians.

These circumstances demand a comprehensive, transparent, and objective national inquiry into the appropriateness and efficacy of these interventions, and to determine what lessons can be learned for the future. Such an inquiry cannot be commissioned or conducted impartially by our governments as it is their responses and actions to the COVID-19 which would be under investigation.

The National Citizen’s Inquiry (NCI) is a citizen-led and citizen-funded initiative that is completely independent from government.” (https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/).

[3] Jesse Brown, “The President of the CBC Lives In Brooklyn: She’s been back and forth throughout the pandemic,” Canadaland, 11 December 2020 (https://www.canadaland.com/the-president-of-the-cbc-lives-in-brooklyn/).

[4] “Under U.S. election law, it is illegal for someone who is not an American citizen to contribute to a U.S. election campaign.”  Elizabeth Thompson, “Hundreds of Canadian residents contributing to U.S. candidates,” CBC News, 7 November 2016 (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-trump-clinton-u-s-election-1.3837993).

[5] “Filings with the United States’ Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that CBC CEO Catherine Tait donated to the presidential campaign of Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016….At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tait’s own status as a Canadian citizen was also brought into question after the online outlet Canadaland published an article revealing how the CBC CEO owned a $5.4 million residence in Brooklyn, New York with her husband.

According to CBC, Tait was required to take a second residence in Canada in order to comply with the broadcaster’s requirements.”

Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, “CBC CEO donated to Hillary Clinton, listed NY as residence,” True North, 18 April 2023 (https://tnc.news/2023/04/18/cbc-ceo-clinton-ny-residence1/).

[6] CBC/Radio-Canada, “CBC’s new President:  Who is Catherine Tait?” n.d.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Tait

[8] CBC/Radio-Canada, “CBC/Radio-Canada joins global charter to fight disinformation,” 9 September, 2019 (https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/trusted-news-charter-fight-disinformation).

[9] Ibid.

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Task_Force_for_Public_Media

[11] https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/global-task-force/

[12] “Trusted News Initiative announces plans to tackle harmful coronavirus disinformation,” 27 March 2020 (https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/trusted-news-initiative-plan-disinformation-coronavirus).

[13] RSF, “RSF and its partners unveil the Journalism Trust Initiative to combat Disinformation,” 3 April 2018 (https://rsf.org/en/rsf-and-its-partners-unveil-journalism-trust-initiative-combat-disinformation).

[14] Prof. Eugene Lang, “CBC president Catherine Tait is out of her lane,” 24 February 2023 (https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2023/cbc-president-catherine-tait-is-out-of-her-lane/).

[15] Lee Harding, “Ex-CBC journalist testifies broadcaster did propaganda, not newsgathering,” 6 April 2023 (https://www.westernstandard.news/news/ex-cbc-journalist-testifies-broadcaster-did-propaganda-not-newsgathering/article_ec81c9dc-d481-11ed-ac8e-93c1d6a543ce.html).

[16] Rodney Palmer FULL Interview | Day 1 Toronto | National Citizens Inquiry, 4 April 2023 (https://rumble.com/v2fs7u2-rodney-palmer-full-interview-day-1-toronto-national-citizens-inquiry.html).

[17] https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-health/about/people/dean/about-jha

[18] Ashish Jha, “The Snake-Oil Salesmen of the Senate,” New York Times, 24 November 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html).

[19] https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1642628294460727296?s=20

[20] Lee Harding, “Ex-CBC journalist testifies broadcaster did propaganda, not newsgathering,” 6 April 2023 (https://www.westernstandard.news/news/ex-cbc-journalist-testifies-broadcaster-did-propaganda-not-newsgathering/article_ec81c9dc-d481-11ed-ac8e-93c1d6a543ce.html).

[21] EBU: Operating Eurovision and Euroradio, “Trusted News Initiative steps up global fight against disinformation and targets US presidential election,” 13 July 2020  (https://www.ebu.ch/news/2020/07/trusted-news-initiative-steps-up-global-fight-against-disinformation-and-targets-us-presidential-election).

[22] Eric Horvitz, “A promising step forward on disinformation, Microsoft, 22 February 2021 (https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2021/02/22/deepfakes-disinformation-c2pa-origin-cai/).

[23] Rodney Palmer, “Propaganda VS Newsgathering at CBC and other media,” The Crazy Times, p. 5, 4 April 2023.

[24] Peter A. McCullough, et al., “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection,” Am J Med. 2021 Jan; 134(1): 16–22 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7410805/).; Published online 2020 Aug 7. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.07.003.  See also the very extensive website, c19study.com; see https://swprs.org/on-the-treatment-of-covid-19; and see PubMed for further outpatient Covid early treatment, (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%28%22early+outpatient+treatment%3A%29+AND+%28covid-19+OR+sars-2%29&sort=).

[25] https://twitter.com/woodreporting/status/1644121846151798786?s=46&t=TLc7JVsKdWHF3–cJphA0g

[26] https://www.trishwoodpodcast.com/podcast/episode-158-rodney-palmer

[27] Jonathan Bradley, “Israeli doctors scold Trudeau for comparing convoy protesters to Nazis, True North, 19 February 2022 (https://tnc.news/2022/02/19/israeli-doctors-scold-trudeau-for-comparing-convoy-protesters-to-nazis/).

[28] Trish Wood is Critical, “Episode 116: Marianne Klowak,” circa 4 July 2022 (https://www.trishwoodpodcast.com/podcast/episode-116-marianne-klowak).

[29] Melanie Risdon, “CBC reporter resigns, says public broadcaster losing journalistic principles,” Western Standard, 13 July 2022 (https://www.westernstandard.news/manitoba/cbc-reporter-resigns-says-public-broadcaster-losing-journalistic-principles/article_f72ab8a0-022a-11ed-919a-431ab20401f3.html).

[30] Tara Henley, “Why I quite the CBC,” National Post, 3 January 2022 (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tara-henley-why-i-quit-the-cbc?__vfz=medium%3Dstandalone_content_recirculation_with_ads).

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Joanna Chiu and Steve McKinley, “Is CBC at a crossroads? Or are Twitter spat and Poilievre barbs just more of the same?” The Standard, 23 April 2023 (https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ts/news/canada/2023/04/23/is-cbc-at-a-crossroads-or-are-twitter-spat-and-poilievre-barbs-just-more-of-the-same.html).

[34] Ibid.

[35] Laura Neilson Bonikowsky, “Founding of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC),” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 4 March 2015 (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/founding-of-the-cbc-feature).

[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation

[37] Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “2020-2021 Annual Report”. Archived from the original on March 22, 2023.

[38] Paul Audley, “The future of CBC/Radio-Canada is at stake in this election: Canada’s national public broadcasting services are in a position of unprecedented vulnerability after decades of cuts under both Conservative and Liberal governments,” Toronto Star, 3 September 2021 (https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/09/03/the-future-of-cbcradio-canada-is-at-stake-in-this-election.html).

[39] Pinned comment at “CBC editorial independence is a lie,” National Post, 13 April 2023 (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/cbc-editorial-independence-is-a-lie).

[40] https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/vision/leadership/board-of-directors

[41] https://legacy.friends.ca/explore/article/how-to-fix-the-cbc/

[42] With thanks to Robert Meynell for assistance with these points.

[43] https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/vision/leadership/senior-executive-team

[44] Terry Glavin, “Something’s Deeply Wrong With The CBC, therealstory.substack.com, 22 April 2023.

Nov 162023
 

I recently posted about the cases of  7 Ontario doctors:

2023-02-19 . . . ONTARIO Doctors who Dissented from Covid-19 Doctrines Fight for their Professional Lives. by Jason Unrau. C2C Journal.

Below we have news from BRITISH COLUMBIA.  Bless Drea Humphrey!

The focus on BILL 36 (AWARENESS of the Bill) brought doctors out in significant numbers.  They are not afraid to speak up.  Bless them, too!

– – – – – – – – – –

Critics of the Health Professions and Occupations Act believe that it will lead to the politicization of healthcare and grant the Minister of Health sweeping power over how health practitioners can provide care for their patients.

In today’s report, I interview doctors and other healthcare professionals who are sounding the alarm about British Columbia’s new Health Professions and Occupations Act (HPOA).

The Act, formerly called Bill 36, was passed in November of last year, despite members of the legislature never getting the chance to formally debate more than half of the bill’s over 600 sections.

 

 

Critics of the Health Professions and Occupations Act believe that it will lead to the politicization of healthcare and grant the Minister of Health sweeping power over how health practitioners can provide care for their patients.

Watch the full report to hear concerns about the Act from some of BC’s finest in healthcare, including Ukrainian-born Dr. Marina Sapozhnikov MD, who says the HPOA is reminiscent of her time under the rule of the Soviet Union.

 

 

Rebel News traveled by ferry to meet with these health professionals in Victoria after thousands of postcards from citizens calling for the Act to be repealed were submitted to the legislative assembly by the Conservative Party of BC.

If you appreciate that we are able to be your eyes and ears by bringing you important reports like this, please consider donating what you can here at www.RebelFieldReports.com to help us cover our expenses.

Nov 142023
 

RELATED:

1.   2023-11-29 B.C.: Bonnie Henry named as defendant in class-action lawsuit over her role in COVID-19 vaccine mandate           which is this posting.

2.   2023-12-04 Pastor challenges Dr. Bonnie Henry over illegal discrimination between faith groups. From the JCCF.

(2024-04-29:  there are no further updates to report at this time about the Pastor Koopman case.)

3.   2021-09-14 Vaccines: From Okanagan Health Professionals, B.C. Canada: Open Letter to Dr. Bonnie Henry, Adrian Dix, and Premier John Horgan

This is a pretty powerful statement from the Okanagan Health Professionals, made in 2021.

4.   2023-12-06 Bill 36 (B.C.) is the Health Professions & Occupations Act. First class tyranny. But we can stop it, by pitching in to help  CSASPP  the Canadian Society for Science & Ethics in Medicine.  Just spread the word.

5.    2024-04-29      Status of court case. BC, versus Bonnie Henry, by  CSASPP, the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy.

 

2023-11-29 B.C.      Bonnie Henry named as defendant in class-action lawsuit over her role in COVID-19 vaccine mandates

NOTE:  James Baldwin is the plaintiff in this class action, on behalf of  public sector employees.  Umar Sheikh from Victoria is the lawyer for the case.   It’s confusing because there is another case that sounds the same – – #5 in the above list.  I do not think that the two class action cases have been amalgamated, but I could be wrong.

UPDATE, Nov 15, 2024:  The Baldwin class action has since merged with a separate class action claim by United Health Care Workers of BC. The two parties will present arguments over five days of hearings beginning April 7, 2025.

With thanks to Kelowna Now.  By  Iain Burns  

A group representing unionized public service workers has announced a class-action lawsuit against the BC government over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Representative plaintiff Jason Baldwin, who was fired by the Ministry of Finance due to the mandate, launched the suit today on behalf of affected BC Public Service workers.

As well as the provincial government, the suit lists Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry as a defendant.

The suit demands general damages for misfeasance in public office, aggravated damages and punitive damages.

It has been backed by the non-profit BCPS Employees for Freedom Society (BCPSEF), which describes itself as a “diverse group of public servants who stand together for medical privacy and bodily autonomy.”

<who> Photo credit: NowMedia/Colin Smith

Photo credit: NowMedia/Colin Smith

Discussing the suit today, BCPSEF said the Province and Dr. Henry introduced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees in November 2021 that “was contrary to public service employees’ Charter rights.”

That mandate violated the “medical privacy and bodily autonomy of 38,000 BC public servants with its coercive and unjustifiable proof of COVID-19 vaccination mandate,” the group added.

BCPSEF said the requirement for workers to be vaccinated led to “untold suffering and harm to public servants and public services.”

The suit claims Dr. Henry committed misfeasance because she had “no basis in fact to justify the information, data and advice she provided and upon which the Province relied to develop its employee vaccination policy.”

It also accuses her of “wilfully or recklessly ignor[ing] known potential risks of adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccination in providing advice to the Province.”

The lawsuit further claims that employees’ rights to freedom of association were violated by the Province and that “forced disclosure of private medical information violated common law and statutory privacy rights.”

Baldwin has retained the services of Umar Sheikh from Sheikh Law in Victoria.

The notice of civil claim can be read here.

The court must now determine if the suit meets the requirements for a class action.

If that determination is made, it will be certified as a class-action suit and can proceed.

Last month, a separate suit, also listing Dr. Henry and the Province as defendants, was filed by two plaintiffs representing fired healthcare workers.

Health professionals in the province are still required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to work, a policy BC United leader Kevin Falcon said is part of a “crusade” by the NDP government.

= = = = = =  = =  = = =

 

In addition, co-plaintiff Jedediah Ferguson, who worked at Cumberland Regional Hospital laundry since June 2015, also received a leave of absence before Interior Health fired her.

According to court documents filed on October 13, the plaintiffs tabled the action “on behalf of members of the class consisting of all unionized healthcare workers in British Columbia who have been subject to the COVID-19 vaccination status information and preventative measures order.”

It asserts the Henry undermined their contractual employment agreements when she issued the public health order on October 14, 2021.

The plaintiffs claim she “acted with reckless indifference or willful blindness” by continuing to enforce the order.

 

 

According to the order, “vaccination is safe, very effective, and the single most important preventive measure for health professionals […] to protect patients, residents and clients, and the health and personal care workforce, from […] COVID-19.”

The suit counters that claim, suggesting the COVID vaccine monographs are ‘misleading,’ while referencing the risk of sustaining an adverse side-effect from the jab, including blood clots. The plaintiffs seek damages for the alleged contract breach, “misfeasance” in public office, and the suit’s certification.

The province had 21 days to respond from the action’s filing, with no response reported as of writing.

 

 

Sep 152023
 

Some of the “COUTTS” COURT CASES IN LETHBRIDGE AB,  arising out of the FREEDOM CONVOY.  Egregious.

  1. Artur Pawlowski
  2. Marco Huigenbos
  3. “The Coutts 4”  (Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin, and Christopher Lysak)
  4. Jaclyne Martin, the wife of Jerry Morin who is one of “The Coutts 4”

“Coutts” was happening at the same time as the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, at the Windsor border crossing, and in other locations in Canada.  I joined the estimated 14 to 15 thousand who protested in Victoria, BC.  The day was January 29, 2022.  I would not have missed it for anything.  It was an incredible day of joy and celebration with other Canadians.  A man on a bench, taking in the happiness in the crowds of people said to me, “This is the Canada I remember!”

SENTENCING OF ARTUR PAWLOWSKI

July 26 – I told you Pawlowski was scheduled to be sentenced in Lethbridge, AB on August 9th.

Aug  09 – I was up and at the Court House 2 hours in advance, to ensure I’d have a seat in the Court Room.  Which Court Room for the sentencing of Pawlowski?

I went through Security; and was directed to a large bulletin Board with many postings. I found a listing of various cases, but no Pawlowski; no names that started with “P”.   I searched some other lists but they were for other things.  No Pawlowski’s.

I exited the Court House to wait for the arrival of other people.  And eventually went through Security a second time.  Happily saying I was here for the sentencing of Pawlowski.  Did anyone happen to know the Court Room Number?   . . . silence.

Inside I went to the counter where there was a woman working behind a glass partition at a computer.  Could she please look up the Pawlowski case and tell me the Court Room number? . . .  No,  I needed to go to the Bulletin Board.  The day’s cases are listed there.  . . .  Yes,  I have already done that.  I can’t find Pawlowski listed.  . . .  You have to go to the Bulletin Board . . .  You are working on a computer.  Could you please enter the name Pawlowski?  I’m sure your system can find the file. . . .  well it seems that the Court House must have a very dumb computer – – I didn’t say so.  What I did say is this:  In a democracy trials are conducted in public.  If you won’t tell me where the sentencing will be held, then the sentencing can not be open to me, the Public.  This is the stuff of police states, tyrannies.

I exited the Court House again, to wait outside.  A woman arrived who, like me, wished to witness the sentencing of Pawlowski.  She is from Cranbrook, B.C., well informed.  The conversation was stimulating.

Eventually I went to Security a third time.  There was a line-up of people going in, but none for Pawlowski.  I joked with the fellows working the Security line.  Here I am, back again.  I just need a small piece of information:  does anyone happen to know in which Court Room Pawlowski is being sentenced?   The fellow in front of me didn’t say anything.  The fellow next down the line didn’t look at me, but he said loud enough to easily be heard:  “the sentencing of Pawlowski was postponed until September 18th.”  I heartily thanked him for the information.

PAWLOWSKI – – IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, SENT EARLIER

The Parliament of the European Union heard an appeal of Pawl ski’s situation.

After years of harassment by some police, prosecutors, judges, and jailers, THAT STARTED BEFORE COVID, the Alberta Court of Appeal last summer (July 2022)  found Pawlowski not guilty of a suite of charges that came up through the lower courts.  An innocent man.  Restitution to Pawlowski was ordered by the Appeal Court.

There were  remaining charges related to the Coutts blockade.  “Mischief”,  deemed to be criminal, drawing up to ten years in jail if found guilty.  To be processed in Provincial Court, Lethbridge.   Everything started over again.  In July 2023, the Judge found Pawlowski guilty.

Come to Lethbridge if you possibly can. . . .  I am returning for the sentencing (Monday, Sept 18th) and other court proceedings the next day related to “Coutts”.

(I want to use accurate language.  I’ll confirm this description when I’m in Lethbridge:)

The RCMP had a check-point at Milk River (a whistle stop before you get to Coutts. Thinly-populated country).  The RCMP were checking people in the south-bound lane of a rural, 2-way road/highway to the U.S. border.

There was no “blockade” by the RCMP, or by the truckers at Coutts.

The truckers” at Coutts, down the road from Milk River where the RCMP were situated, consisted of truckers, farmers with big machinery including trucks, and people who drove down from other parts of Alberta (Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary, Fort MacLeod, etc).

The congregation of people at Coutts did not block any road/highway.  There is plenty of parking at Coutts to accommodate potential line-ups of vehicles crossing the border.  There’s little more than farmers’ fields adjacent to the road/highway between Milk River and Coutts.  This is very flat country!

There are video’d scenes of lots of very large vehicles parked in orderly fashion in winter conditions;  the local tavern, a community gathering place is close by.  The atmosphere is similar to that in Ottawa at the same time:  bonfires with people gathered round to warm themselves,  the sharing of food, children chasing and having fun, lots of laughter.  People connecting and helping each other, sharing stories, getting acquainted.  Discussions taking place inside and outside the tavern.

The use of the Court and Jail system to silence citizens you don’t like has to be stopped.   You get a fair trial.   It’s not fair if you have to pay literally a million dollars in lawyer bills to get to an Appeal Court to establish your innocence.  (Pawlowski could do that, but only because Canadians helped crowd-fund the legal bills.)

Then he starts over again in Lethbridge Provincial Court with charges of mischief, looking at potentially 10 years in jail.   I don’t know how else to see it:  Political Prisoners.    Julian Assange comes to mind.  (I posted an update on Assange at https://sandrafinley.ca/blog/?p=27931)

 

“THE COUTTS 4”

The July 2023 prosecution of Pawlowski is because he addressed the crowd gathered in the tavern at Coutts.

Marco Huigenbos, town councillor Fort MacLeod, is under prosecution because he went to Coutts.  And happens, in my opinion, to be a natural leader.

2023-09-08 Ft MacLeod Councillor, Marco Van Huigenbos, speaks on the plight of the Coutts 4

– – – – –  – – – –

Sent: August 8, 2023 11:24 AM   Subject: article about one of the Lethbridge trials

Hi Sandra,

I don’t know if you saw this article about the trial re the Coutts blockade and the 4 men who are on trial.  (URL in next email.)

It seems overwhelming right now, partly because so much more has been exposed and also because there is this tremendous push right now to steamroll over ordinary people all over the world.

= = = = = = = =

Sent: August 16, 2023 12:57 PM
Subject: RE: Grus case update

Thanks for the Constable Helen Grus update (August 15, 2023).

3 excerpts, with thanks to the reporting by Rebel News:

Grus was censored by her superiors as she attempted to probe an unusual pattern of sudden infant deaths (a cluster of 9 SIDS deaths) following the rollout of the novel COVID vaccines.  

Ottawa detective conducts alleged ‘unauthorized’ probe into the COVID-19 vaccination status of mothers whose babies died suddenly, superiors launch a vendetta against her after media leak.

(Former RCMP officer Danny Bulford attended the Police disciplinary hearing of Grus.  He later testified at the

National Citizen’s Inquiry (NCI) and claims that people within the force will “self-censor themselves” out of fear. “That is one of the most chilling things I heard you say in your testimony,” replied the commissioner.  The Rebel News report includes the NCI video clip.

 https://www.rebelnews.com/political_meddling_suspected_in_ottawa_police_investigation_of_constable_helen_grus

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

You may be interested in this article about the trial re the Coutts blockade and the 4 men who are on trial,

https://www.globalresearch.ca/freeland-designate-them-as-terrorists-seize-their-assets-impair-them-case-coutts-four/5827709

Included at the URL,  there WAS an inserted youtube interview of  Jaclyne Martin, the wife of Jerry Morin who is one of “The Coutts 4”.

The story is another of those shockers that should get out.   Jaclyne Martin, well-spoken.  I wish I had a copy of the interview to post.

= = = = = = =

I am now back in BC after 2-3 weeks with my Mother and family (in Sask);  also a stop in Lethbridge for the Pawlowski sentencing – – which didn’t happen.

A take away from Lethbridge experience:  Some people in the Justice System (Lethbridge, AB for example!) do not want to understand that trials are PUBLIC.  If they refuse to tell you the status of particular cases and refer you to “boards” where there is no record of the particular case,  the proceedings can’t be followed.   They are not accessible by the public, not even if you go in person!  It all seems so mis-guided, counter-productive and such stupid strategy on their part.  EXCEPT THAT what they do is DELIBERATE.  Unbelievable that this is Canada/

Thankfully “things are happening!”.    Like this that you sent,  “The Coutts Four”  (outrageous charges of conspiracy to murder RCMP officers),  and the interview of the wife of one of them, Jaclyne Martin – – my God!   Bless her for refusing to settle and being able to maintain her courage and determination.

NOTE:   In November 2022 I went to Calgary, to a large gathering of concerned people, Rebel News was the organizer.  I went because I wanted to meet people in person, hear what they have to say.  So I can make my own evaluations.  Are they radical crazies?  . . .  uh unh.  No.  I met and talked with good people.  If Canada didn’t have these people, we’d really be up the creek, with not much hope of pulling back from the brink of tyrannical disaster.  I don’t endorse all that is said,  but I seldom do!  no matter who’s doing the talking!

– – – – – – – –

In reply to

From: Saskatchewan
Sent: August 22, 2023
Subject: Fw: Provincial Lawmakers are preparing for an RCMP-less Saskatchewan – TFIGlobal

https://tfiglobalnews.com/2023/08/17/provincial-lawmakers-are-preparing-for-an-rcmp-less-saskatchewan/

Listening to the Inquiry into Invocation of Emergencies Act helped solidify my long-held view that DE-centralization where possible & practical serves people better.

Centralization of the RCMP, to me, helped foster a police state.  ONE CENTRE;  ONE VIEW; AND little capability for ACCOUNTABILITY.    The powers-that-be slid incompetent people into top jobs.  The TOP ECHELONS were YES MEN & YES WOMEN . . . COURTIERS.  Common tactic of tyrants. . . .

Jaclyne Martin (she’s a skeet shooter) is being processed on Sept 19th  in Lethbridge, the last I heard.  The “Coutts 4” have been held in jail for well over a year, denied bail.  I listened to an interview of Jaclyne Martin.   The abuse of the Justice system is God awful, IMHO.   Among worse things done,  Jaclyne has not been allowed to visit, she is not allowed to see her husband, for well over a year now.

This is all the doing of the RCMP.  There’s no guarantee that local police would do better;  but they MIGHT understand the lay of the land better??!!

I am going to attend the Sept Court proceedings in Lethbridge – – they better not get postponed again!   The Justice System has to be held to account.

Sep 102023
 

This is a very large win!

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) will be sending a Report on it.  I’ll post it when received . . .  see

2023-09-11 Appeals Court Rules Biden Administration Likely Violated First Amendment by Pressuring Tech Firms to Censor Social Media Posts, from CHD. (more detailed analysis)

BTW:  the only way I can post material from Reclaim the Net is to post the whole newsletter.

/Sandra

From: Reclaim The Net
Sent: September 10, 2023
Subject: Appeals court rules Biden administration censored free speech

Support Reclaim The Net.

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NEW RULING

 

 

Appeals Court Finds Biden Administration Violated The First Amendment When It Pushed For Social Media Censorship

 

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that certain officials from President Joe Biden’s administration overstepped their bounds by pressuring social media platforms to limit specific content. The court affirmed that the White House, Surgeon General, CDC, and FBI likely infringed upon the First Amendment by urging or significantly influencing the decisions of social media companies to censor content.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

However, the court delineated its position, pointing out discrepancies with a previous lower court decision. It disagreed with the district court’s previous judgment that the NIAID, CISA, and State Department Officials had potentially violated the First Amendment.

The broader injunction originally issued by District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty in the Missouri v. Biden case sought to bar the Biden administration from pushing social media platforms to censor. This injunction was rooted in the belief that these actions suppressed protected speech.

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, the FBI’s interactions with tech giants came under intense scrutiny. The court agreed that their collaboration wasn’t confined solely to addressing foreign threats and that the FBI extended its scope to encompass content emerging from within American borders.

The judges wrote that the Biden Administration likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences,” and also found the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

Of the ten provisions set in the original injunction, the court decided to maintain the sixth one. This provision prohibits officials from exerting undue influence on companies to remove content. The language of this provision was revised to ensure clarity and to prevent misinterpretation. It emphasizes that government officials must not pressure social media platforms to censor protected free speech, even in indirect manners.

Elaborating on the decision, the court noted, “Under the modified injunction, the enjoined Defendants cannot coerce or significantly encourage a platform’s content-moderation decisions.” Any suggestion of adverse consequences, even if not directly communicated or realized, that may be perceived as punitive in nature by a reasonable individual, falls under this prohibition.

While the ruling marked a major development, the appeals court also accepted the Biden administration’s plea to pause the enforcement of the injunction for ten days, allowing them time to approach the Supreme Court.

“In an unprecedented, historic decision, the Fifth Circuit has recognized that the conduct of the White House, CDC, Surgeon General, and FBI violated Americans’ First Amendment rights. The government cannot coerce or encourage social media companies to censor views it dislikes. This decision vindicates the Plaintiffs’ rights and protects the free speech of all Americans,” said Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel of the NCLA to Reclaim The Net. The NCLA represented their clients, censorship victims, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty, and Ms. Jill Hines in the lawsuit.

“The Biden Administration’s coordinated censorship campaign against the American people ends today. The Fifth Circuit’s decision details blatantly unlawful conduct by multiple agencies, and its order forbids the government’s widespread contempt for the First Amendment from continuing in no uncertain terms,” Mark Chenoweth, President and General Counsel, NCLA said.

 

“THE FUTURE IS DIGITAL”

 

 

EU Chief Boasts About Vaccine Passports, Calls For More Global Digital Collaboration – Paving The Way For Digital IDs

 

With an ominous call for increased global collaboration and centralization, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen at a G20 Summit session, dubbed “One Future,” today appealed for an international regulatory body for Artificial Intelligence and digital ID systems similar to coronavirus vaccine passports.

Von der Leyen audaciously proclaimed our collective future to be digital, hence the implied necessity for global entities to draw boundaries and enforce regulations.

Von der Leyen, in her position as the EU Commission President, touched on AI and the digital landscape in her address. She acknowledged the potential dangers and gargantuan opportunities linked with advancing AI technology and emphasized the importance of channeling such explosive technology.

“Today I want to focus on AI and digital infrastructure. As it has been described, AI has risks but also offers tremendous opportunities. The crucial question is how to harness a rapidly changing technology.

“In the EU, in 2020, we presented the first-ever law on artificial intelligence. We want to facilitate innovation while building trust. But we need more. What the world does now will shape our future. I believe that Europe — and its partners — should develop a new global framework for AI risks,” von der Leyen said.

 

 

Von der Leyen praised the European Union’s move in 2020 to introduce the first legal framework on AI, a step taken with the intent of fostering innovation alongside trust. However, she insisted that this wasn’t sufficient. She suggested a multinational adoption of a coping mechanism for managing AI risks.

The EU Chief also stressed that globally accepted standards must be created under the purview of the United Nations, akin to their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Humanity stood to benefit, she argued, if an international authority could clarify the risks and rewards related to AI, akin to the IPCC for climate concerns.

Concurrently, von der Leyen championed the concept of digital public infrastructure similar to the coronavirus passport system – a system developed by the EU as a response to the Covid saga. The World Health Organization embraced it with open arms as a global standard for combating health threats.

“Many of you are familiar with the COVID-19 digital certificate. The EU developed it for itself. The model was so functional and so trusted that 51 countries on 4 continents adopted it for free. Today, the WHO uses it as a global standard to facilitate mobility in times of health threats,” von der Leyen continued.

Alarmingly, von der Leyen praised the EU’s strides towards a bloc-wide digital identity app capable of storing a citizen’s personal information, including credit cards, driver’s license, and passport data.

These developments ring alarm bells for individuals and nations valuing free speech and privacy.

 

ROUND 2

 

 

X Sues California Over Content “Moderation” Law

 

In the recent wave of internet regulations emerging from California, one stands out as particularly contentious: AB 587, labeled the “transparency” bill. While the overarching concept of transparency has been applauded by some, the real-world implications of this particular legislation have raised alarms across the digital space as, in this instance, it’s being used as a form of censorship.

Elon Musk and X, with his notable influence and resources, has stepped into the spotlight to challenge this law’s validity and is welcomed since a similar lawsuit against the bill failed in recent weeks.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

AB 587 exemplifies the complications of politicians trying to curb online “misinformation,” and how they rub up against the First Amendment.

When Minds, Tim Pool, and the Babylon Bee took the charge with a lawsuit filed earlier this year, the lawsuit eventually fizzled out as the judge couldn’t find how the law would affect the plaintiffs. The court cited an inadequate presentation of the potential harm this law could inflict.

While some argued that the law did affect the plaintiffs, it’s very clear that it does at least affect large social media platforms – meaning that the door was open for another entity to come along and challenge the law.

Taking up the mantle, Musk’s X has now mounted a robust legal challenge against the law. Bolstering their claim, they’ve enlisted Floyd Abrams, a renowned First Amendment lawyer, to represent them, and have gone with a strong compelled speech argument.

According to the lawsuit, filed by X, AB 587, promoted by the State of California as a “transparency” measure for social media companies, is argued to infringe on constitutional free speech rights. The complaint claims it forces companies like X into involuntary speech and meddles in their editorial decisions. The argument points out that while the law mandates companies to disclose their content moderation policies, its real intention is to coerce these platforms into eradicating content the state finds problematic. This perspective is supported by legislative documents and statements from the law’s creators, emphasizing the objective to combat “divisive content” and promote “better corporate citizens.” Essentially, critics believe the primary aim of AB 587 is to pressure platforms into eliminating government-disapproved content.

Read background information on California’s AB 587 here.

Read the analysis of the failure of the first legal challenge here.

 

SPEECH CONTROL IS LAW ENFORCEMENT?

 

 

Massachusetts Attorney General Claims Censorship Records Could Reveal “Law Enforcement Matters”

 

America First Legal has disclosed that their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General resulted in the categorization of “misinformation” and “disinformation” investigations as a “law enforcement matter.”

This information stems from an inquiry into the Attorney General’s response to a letter written by twelve Democrat state attorneys general to the heads of Twitter (now X) and Facebook.

The letter urged these tech giants to censor certain viewpoints of US citizens, notably those of the “Disinformation Dozen.” This initiative was backed by the UK’s pro-censorship body, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

In a reply on September 6, 2023, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office opted to withhold records in relation to AFL’s inquiry. The reason? Disclosures could inadvertently shed light on “multistate law enforcement matters.” The nature of the letter itself, a call for censorship, was intriguingly described as a “multistate” “law enforcement matter.”

 

 

This treatment of misinformation and disinformation as potential legal transgressions has heightened concerns surrounding the sanctity of free speech.

In response to this, AFL is diving deeper, submitting a subsequent request to the Attorney General’s office. They seek clarity and comprehensive records that shed light on how many such “law enforcement investigations” linked to misinformation or disinformation have been undertaken.

Gene Hamilton, Vice President and General Counsel of America First Legal, voiced his alarm: “If so-called misinformation and disinformation are legitimate law enforcement matters for the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, then the First Amendment is under much more severe threat than anyone realizes. They are either trying to hide the existence of damaging emails and documents that reveal the extent of their desire to censor American speech, or they have completely lost their minds regarding what the First Amendment protects.”

 

VINDICATED

 

 

Editor Fired Over Tweet Receives Damages From Literary Consultancy

 

Cornerstones Literary Consultancy, a prominent name in the world of publishing, has issued an apology and agreed to pay “substantial” compensation to Sibyl Ruth, a 63-year-old editor who was let go from her position in the aftermath of a tweet she posted in May.

The tweet in question had Ruth reacting to a photograph of a transgender individual. “I do believe that people should be allowed to wear what they want etc etc… But what blows my mind is the idea that with heavy five o’clock shadow, a perm and lippy and a bag with gold chains = woman,” Ruth tweeted. She went on to add, “While us boring biological women get derided if we have one or two faint chin hairs.”

Shortly after this tweet was highlighted to Cornerstones’ management, Ruth’s ongoing projects were halted and her profile was taken down from the consultancy’s official website. The abrupt removal left Ruth feeling “shell shocked” and marginalized, reflecting on the experience as a moment she “just disappeared.” Describing the sudden turn of events, she said, “They took me off a project. It was just a bit strange.”

Emphasizing her position, The Telegraph reported, Ruth clarified that her stance wasn’t against progressive views, stating, “This is not a fight against wokeness. It is simply fighting for freedom of expression.”

Cornerstones, in their public apology posted on Twitter, acknowledged their oversight, confessing that the dismissal was due to her expressing opinions that clashed with the views of the Cornerstones team. They further admitted that while they were concerned about potential backlash from the broader publishing community, their reaction to the situation was hasty. They conceded, “Cornerstones ought to have more firmly encouraged an open dialogue with her before taking any action.”

Furthermore, the company recognized Ruth’s feminist beliefs, stating they are “worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Ruth, having served Cornerstones for 18 months, was among the consultancy’s group of freelance editors, providing invaluable mentoring, copy editing, and proofreading services to various authors.

Cornerstones’ actions prompted Ruth to launch a crowdfunding campaign for her legal expenses, eventually raising £16,000 ($20,000). In her statement on the site, she expressed her gratitude towards her legal team, notably the lawyers from the Free Speech Union, and the overwhelming public support she received.

 

Thanks for reading,

Reclaim The Net

Aug 252023
 

John Carpay: Canada’s Regulatory Colleges Have No Business Monitoring Speech

FeaturedOpinions and Columns

John Carpay – The Epoch Times

The suppression of free speech is almost always based on arrogance, and boils down to “free speech for me, but not for thee.” The College of Psychologists of Ontario demands that Dr. Jordan Peterson submit to mandatory re-education (the college calls it a “coaching program”) to make his public expression of opinion conform to the college’s progressive ideology.

The college claims that various political and cultural comments made by Dr. Peterson are “degrading, demeaning, unprofessional, disgraceful and dishonourable,” and that they pose “moderate risks of harm to the public” such as “undermining public trust in the profession of psychology.”

The world-famous author, podcaster, and political commentator has been registered with the college as a clinical psychologist since 1999 but stopped seeing patients in 2017. Nevertheless, the most famous Canadian on the planet has maintained his membership in the college and refers to himself publicly as a clinical psychologist.

The complaints against Dr. Peterson are not about how he cared for his patients. Rather, complaints have come from people who disagree with his comments on cultural and political topics like racism, transgenderism, and feminism. A life-long student of totalitarianism as practised by the National Socialists in Germany (1933–1945) and by the international socialists (communists) in the Soviet Union (1917–1991) and other countries, Dr. Peterson has repeatedly warned of the dangers of slowly losing our freedom of expression.

As summarized by Justices Backhouse, Schabas, and Krawchenko, who are sitting as a Divisional Court panel of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the comments to which the college objected include the following:

(a) A tweet on Jan. 2, 2022, in which Dr. Peterson responded to an individual who expressed concern about overpopulation by stating, “You’re free to leave at any point.” (b) Various comments made on a Jan. 25, 2022, appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, where Dr. Peterson is identified as a clinical psychologist and spoke about a “vindictive” client whose complaint about him was a “pack of lies.” Speaking about air pollution and child deaths, Dr. Peterson said (with sarcastic irony), “It’s just poor children, and the world has too many people on it anyways.” (c) A tweet on Feb. 7, 2022, in which Dr. Peterson referred to Gerald Butts as a “prik.” (d) A tweet on Feb. 19, 2022, in which Dr. Peterson commented that Catherine McKenney, an Ottawa city councillor who uses they/them pronouns, was an “appalling self-righteous moralizing thing.” (e) In response to a tweet about actor Elliot Page being “proud” to introduce a trans character on a TV show, Dr. Peterson tweeted on June 22, 2022, “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.” (f) A further complaint about Dr. Peterson’s Jan. 2, 2022, tweet in which he responded to an individual who expressed concern about overpopulation by stating, “You’re free to leave at any point.” (g) Dr. Peterson’s tweet posted in May 2022, commenting on a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition plus-sized model, “Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”

On Nov. 22, 2022, a disciplinary panel of the college ruled that Dr. Peterson “appeared to be engaging in degrading comments about a former client and making demeaning jokes” on the “Joe Rogan Experience.” The college felt that by referring to Elliot Page as “her” and by using Elliot’s former name, and “by calling Catherine McKenney an ‘appalling self-righteous moralizing thing’… Dr. Peterson may be engaging in degrading, demeaning, and unprofessional comments.” The college felt that referring to the physician who removed Elliot Page’s breasts as a “criminal” is “inflammatory and unprofessional.” The college regards the Gerald Butts and Sports Illustrated comments as “disgraceful, dishonourable and/or unprofessional.”

Predictably, the college has also asserted that it “in no way disagrees that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees Dr. Peterson a right to freedom of expression.” The “professional standards and ethics” used by the college to censor Dr. Peterson happen to have been created by the college and are now interpreted and enforced by the college. If a psychologist says something the college dislikes, it can simply declare those comments to be “unprofessional” or “unethical” or both. That ends the debate. This makes it possible for the college to join so many other censors, presently and throughout history, who say: “I like free speech, as long as you say what I like.”

That the court sided with the college against Dr. Peterson is not surprising, considering the fact that Canada’s Chief Justice, Richard Wagner has stated publicly that he is “proud” of his Supreme Court being “progressive.” Many Canadian judges would reject this ideological bias, but a public declaration of this kind, from the leader of the highest court in the land, does set the tone for other courts.

The three-judge panel held that the forced re-education of Dr. Peterson is nothing to worry about because it is merely “remedial” and not “disciplinary,” and will have only a “minimal” impact on Dr. Peterson’s right to freedom of expression.

The court split hairs by declaring that it “was not necessary to engage in whether Dr. Peterson’s comments were supported by facts or were his honest opinion, as the concern arises from the nature of the language used, not the validity of his opinions.” So, truth and facts don’t matter to this court; it’s all about some mysterious “nature of the language used” that empowers the college to censor the speech of psychologists.

It’s no different for nurse Amy Hamm, currently being prosecuted by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives for stating publicly that there are only two sexes, and that women deserve their own safe spaces (washrooms, changerooms, female-only sporting events, female prisons, etc.) where biological males may not enter.

In like manner, law societies across Canada are now monitoring the speech of lawyers, even forcing lawyers to express agreement with beliefs and goals that individual lawyers disagree with.

In this way, “professional standards” become the pretext for silencing Canadian doctors, nurses, psychologists, accountants, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and other professionals who espouse conservative, libertarian, traditionalist, classical liberal, or other non-woke, non-progressive opinions.

Jul 172023
 
Every time I hear that NATO wants MORE money from its member nations I want to take to the streets in defiance.
Warm up with this from TomDispatch.  It’s for an American audience, published by Children’s Health Defense.  Sweet sanity.
02/02/23

U.S. Military Industrial Complex Is ‘Choking Democracy’ — How Do We Stop It?

America’s founders were profoundly skeptical of large militaries, of entangling alliances with foreign powers and of permanent wars, according to Bill Astore, a “card-carrying member” of the military-industrial complex, who warns: “So should we all be.”

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By William Astore

My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex, or MIC.

Sure, I hung up my military uniform for the last time in 2005. Since 2007, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch focused largely on critiquing that same MIC and America’s permanent war economy.

I’ve written against this country’s wasteful and unwise wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its costly and disastrous weapons systems and its undemocratic embrace of warriors and militarism.

Nevertheless, I remain a lieutenant colonel, if a retired one. I still have my military ID card, if only to get on bases, and I still tend to say “we” when I talk about my fellow soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen (and our “guardians,” too, now that we have a Space Force).

So, when I talk to organizations that are antiwar, that seek to downsize, dismantle, or otherwise weaken the MIC, I’m upfront about my military biases even as I add my own voice to their critiques.

Of course, you don’t have to be antiwar to be highly suspicious of the U.S. military.

Senior leaders in “my” military have lied so often, whether in the Vietnam War era of the last century or in this one about “progress” in Iraq and Afghanistan, that you’d have to be asleep at the wheel or ignorant not to have suspected the official story.

Yet I also urge antiwar forces to see more than mendacity or malice in “our” military.

It was retired general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after all, who first warned Americans of the profound dangers of the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address.

Not enough Americans heeded Eisenhower’s warning then and, judging by our near-constant state of warfare since that time, not to speak of our ever-ballooning “defense” budgets, very few have heeded his warning to this day. How to explain that?

Well, give the MIC credit. Its tenacity has been amazing. You might compare it to an invasive weed, a parasitic cowbird (an image I’ve used before), or even a metastasizing cancer.

As a weed, it’s choking democracy; as a cowbird, it’s gobbling up most of the “food” (at least half of the federal discretionary budget) with no end in sight; as a cancer, it continues to spread, weakening our individual freedoms and liberty.

Call it what you will. The question is: How do we stop it?

I’ve offered suggestions in the past; so, too, have writers for TomDispatch like retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich and retired Army Major Danny Sjursen, as well as William Hartung, Julia Gledhill and Alfred McCoy among others.

Despite our critiques, the MIC grows ever stronger. If Eisenhower’s warning wasn’t eye-opening enough, enhanced by an even more powerful speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967, what could I and my fellow TomDispatch writers possibly say or do to make a difference?

Maybe nothing, but that won’t stop me from trying. Since I am the MIC, so to speak, maybe I can look within for a few lessons that came to me the hard way (in the sense that I had to live them). So, what have l learned of value?

War racketeers enjoy their racket

In the 1930s, Smedley Butler, a Marine general twice decorated with the Medal of Honor, wrote a book entitled, “War Is a Racket.” He knew better than most since, as he confessed in that volume when he wore a military uniform, he served as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

And the corporate-driven racket he helped enable almost a century ago by busting heads from the Caribbean to China was small-scale indeed compared to today’s thoroughly global one.

There’s an obvious lesson to be drawn from its striking endurance, never-ending enlargement and distinct engorgement in our moment (even after all those lost wars it fought): the system will not reform itself.

It will always demand and take more — more money, more authority, more power.

It will never be geared for peace. By its nature, it’s authoritarian and distinctly less than honorable, replacing patriotism with service loyalty and victory with triumphant budgetary authority.

And it always favors the darkest of scenarios, including at present a new cold war with China and Russia, because that’s the best and most expedient way for it to thrive.

Within the military-industrial complex, there are no incentives to do the right thing.

Those few who have a conscience and speak out honorably are punished, including truth-tellers in the enlisted ranks like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale. Even being an officer doesn’t make you immune.

For his temerity in resisting the Vietnam War, David M. Shoup, a retired Marine Corps general and Medal of Honor recipient was typically dismissed by his peers as unbalanced and of questionable sanity.

For all the talk of “mavericks,” whether in Top Gun or elsewhere, we — there’s that “we” again (I can’t help myself!) — in the military are a hotbed of go-along-to-get-along conformity.

Recently, I was talking with a senior enlisted colleague about why so few top-ranking officers are willing to speak truth to the powerless (that’s you and me) even after they retire. He mentioned credibility.

To question the system, to criticize it, to air dirty laundry in public is to risk losing credibility within the club and so to be rejected as a malcontent, disloyal, even “unbalanced.”

Then, of course, that infamous revolving door between the military and giant weapons makers like Boeing and Raytheon simply won’t spin for you.

Seven-figure compensation packages, like the one current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gained from Raytheon after his retirement as an Army general, won’t be an option.

And in America, who doesn’t want to cash in while gaining more power within the system?

Quite simply, it pays so much better to mouth untruths, or at least distinctly less-than-full-truths, in service to the powerful.

And with that in mind, here, at least as I see it, are a few full truths about my old service, the U.S. Air Force, that I guarantee you I won’t be applauded for mentioning.

How about this as a start: that the production of F-35s — an overpriced “Ferrari” of a fighter jet that’s both too complex and remarkably successful as an underperformer — should be canceled (savings: as much as $1 trillion over time); that the much-touted new B-21 nuclear bomber isn’t needed (savings: at least $200 billion) and neither is the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (savings: another $200 billion and possibly the entire Earth from doomsday); that the KC-46 tanker is seriously flawed and should be canceled (savings: another $50 billion).

Now, tote it up. By canceling the F-35, the B-21, the Sentinel and the KC-46, I singlehandedly saved the American taxpayer roughly $1.5 trillion without hurting America’s national defense in the least. But I’ve also just lost all credibility (assuming I had any left) with my old service.

Look, what matters to the military-industrial complex isn’t either the truth or saving your taxpayer dollars but keeping those weapons programs going and the money flowing.

What matters, above all, is keeping America’s economy on a permanent wartime footing both by buying endless new (and old) weapons systems for the military and selling them globally in a bizarrely Orwellian pursuit of peace through war.

How are Americans, Eisenhower’s “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” supposed to end a racket like this?

We certainly should know one thing by now: the MIC will never check itself and Congress, already part of it thanks to impressive campaign donations and the like by major weapons makers, won’t corral it either.

Indeed, last year, Congress shoveled $45 billion more than the Biden administration requested (more even than the Pentagon asked for) to that complex, all ostensibly in your name. Who cares that it hasn’t won a war of the faintest significance since 1945.

Even “victory” in the Cold War (after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991) was thrown away. And now the complex warns us of an onrushing “new cold war” to be waged, naturally, at tremendous cost to you, the American taxpayer.

As citizens, we must be informed, willing and able to act. And that’s precisely why the complex seeks to deny you knowledge, precisely why it seeks to isolate you from its actions in this world. So, it’s up to you — to us — to remain alert and involved.

Most of all, each of us must struggle to keep our identity and autonomy as a citizen, a rank higher than that of any general or admiral, for, as we all need to be reminded, those wearing uniforms are supposed to serve you, not vice-versa.

I know you hear otherwise. You’ve been told repeatedly in these years that it’s your job to “support our troops.” Yet, in truth, those troops should only exist to support and defend you, and of course the Constitution, the compact that binds us all together as a nation.

When misguided citizens genuflect before those troops (and then ignore everything that’s done in their name), I’m reminded yet again of Eisenhower’s sage warning that only Americans can truly hurt this country.

Military service may be necessary, but it’s not necessarily ennobling. America’s founders were profoundly skeptical of large militaries, of entangling alliances with foreign powers and of permanent wars and threats of the same. So should we all be.

Citizens United is the answer

No, not that “Citizens United,” not the case in which the Supreme Court decided corporations had the same free speech rights as you and me, allowing them to coopt the legislative process by drowning us out with massive amounts of “speech,” aka dark-money-driven propaganda.

We need citizens united against America’s war machine.

Understanding how that machine works — not just its waste and corruption, but also its positive attributes — is the best way to wrestle it down, to make it submit to the people’s will. Yet activists are sometimes ignorant of the most basic facts about “their” military.

So what? Does the difference between a sergeant major and a major, or a chief petty officer and the chief of naval operations matter? The answer is: yes.

An antimilitary approach anchored in ignorance won’t resonate with the American people. An antiwar message anchored in knowledge could, however. It’s important, that is, to hit the proverbial nail on the head.

Look, for example, at the traction Donald Trump gained in the presidential race of 2015-2016 when he did something few other politicians then dared do: dismiss the Iraq War as wasteful and stupid.

His election win in 2016 was not primarily about racism, nor the result of a nefarious Russian plot. Trump won, at least in part because, despite his ignorance on so many other things, he spoke a fundamental truth — that America’s wars of this century were horrendous blunders.

Trump, of course, was anything but antimilitary. He dreamed of military parades in Washington, D.C. But I (grudgingly) give him credit for boasting that he knew more than his generals and by that I mean many more Americans need to challenge those in authority, especially those in uniform.

Yet challenging them is just a start. The only real way to wrestle the military-industrial complex to the ground is to cut its funding in half, whether gradually over years or in one fell swoop. Yes, indeed, it’s the understatement of the century to note how much easier that’s said than done.

It’s not like any of us could wave a military swagger stick like a magic wand and make half the Pentagon budget disappear.

But consider this: If I could do so, that military budget would still be roughly $430 billion, easily more than China’s and Russia’s combined, and more than seven times what this country spends on the State Department.

As usual, you get what you pay for, which for America has meant more weapons and disastrous wars.

Join me in imagining the (almost) inconceivable — a Pentagon budget cut in half. Yes, generals and admirals would scream and Congress would squeal.

But it would truly matter because, as a retired Army major general once told me, major budget cuts would force the Pentagon to think — for once.

With any luck, a few sane and patriotic officers would emerge to place the defense of America first, meaning that hubristic imperial designs and forever wars would truly be reined in because there’d simply be no more money for them.

Currently, Americans are giving the Pentagon all it wants — plus some. And how’s that been working out for the rest of us? Isn’t it finally time for us to exercise real oversight, as Eisenhower challenged us to do in 1961?

Isn’t it time to force the Pentagon to pass an audit each year — it’s failed the last five — or else cut its budget even more deeply?

Isn’t it time to hold Congress truly responsible for enabling ever more war by voting out military sycophants?

Isn’t it time to recognize, as America’s founders did, that sustaining a vast military establishment constitutes the slow and certain death of democracy?

Just remember one thing: the military-industrial complex won’t reform itself. It just might have no choice, however, but to respond to our demands, if we as citizens remain alert, knowledgeable, determined and united.

And if it should refuse to, if the MIC can’t be tamed, whether because of its strength or our weakness, you will know beyond doubt that this country has truly lost its way.

Originally published by TomDispatch.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Air Force, who has taught at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School and taught history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

May 312023
 

You may wish to sign up for CRYPTO-GRAM from Bruce Schneier? (copy of recent one below)

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by the Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books — including his latest, A Hacker’s Mind — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His newsletter and blog are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

“Schneier” entered into the search button on my blog:  first reference:

2011-09-03 Election fraud in the U.S., “Murder, Spies & Voting Lies”.  E-voting in Canada.

 

 

God bless Bruce Schneier for his longtime dedication to public education and activism.  I see that I haven’t really told him how much I appreciate and have used his contributions.   2016-04-02 Sent to Bruce Schneier, thwarting activists by intrusion into WordPress.

 

A monthly newsletter about cybersecurity and related topics.

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April 15, 2023

by Bruce Schneier
Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
schneier@schneier.com
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In this issue:

If these links don’t work in your email client, try reading this issue of Crypto-Gram on the web.

  1. NetWire Remote Access Trojan Maker Arrested
  2. How AI Could Write Our Laws
  3. Upcoming Speaking Engagements
  4. US Citizen Hacked by Spyware
  5. ChatGPT Privacy Flaw
  6. Mass Ransomware Attack
  7. Exploding USB Sticks
  8. A Hacker’s Mind News
  9. Hacks at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023
  10. Security Vulnerabilities in Snipping Tools
  11. The Security Vulnerabilities of Message Interoperability
  12. Russian Cyberwarfare Documents Leaked
  13. UK Runs Fake DDoS-for-Hire Sites
  14. North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit
  15. FBI (and Others) Shut Down Genesis Market
  16. Research on AI in Adversarial Settings
  17. LLMs and Phishing
  18. Car Thieves Hacking the CAN Bus
  19. FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations
  20. Bypassing a Theft Threat Model
  21. Gaining an Advantage in Roulette
  22. Hacking Suicide
  23. Upcoming Speaking Engagements

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NetWire Remote Access Trojan Maker Arrested

[2023.03.14] From Brian Krebs:

A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While the defendant in this case hasn’t yet been named publicly, the NetWire website has been leaking information about the likely true identity and location of its owner for the past 11 years.

The article details the mistakes that led to the person’s address.

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How AI Could Write Our Laws

[2023.03.14] Nearly 90% of the multibillion-dollar federal lobbying apparatus in the United States serves corporate interests. In some cases, the objective of that money is obvious. Google pours millions into lobbying on bills related to antitrust regulation. Big energy companies expect action whenever there is a move to end drilling leases for federal lands, in exchange for the tens of millions they contribute to congressional reelection campaigns.

But lobbying strategies are not always so blunt, and the interests involved are not always so obvious. Consider, for example, a 2013 Massachusetts bill that tried to restrict the commercial use of data collected from K-12 students using services accessed via the internet. The bill appealed to many privacy-conscious education advocates, and appropriately so. But behind the justification of protecting students lay a market-altering policy: the bill was introduced at the behest of Microsoft lobbyists, in an effort to exclude Google Docs from classrooms.

What would happen if such legal-but-sneaky strategies for tilting the rules in favor of one group over another become more widespread and effective? We can see hints of an answer in the remarkable pace at which artificial-intelligence tools for everything from writing to graphic design are being developed and improved. And the unavoidable conclusion is that AI will make lobbying more guileful, and perhaps more successful.

It turns out there is a natural opening for this technology: microlegislation.

“Microlegislation” is a term for small pieces of proposed law that cater — sometimes unexpectedly — to narrow interests. Political scientist Amy McKay coined the term. She studied the 564 amendments to the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) considered by the Senate Finance Committee in 2009, as well as the positions of 866 lobbying groups and their campaign contributions. She documented instances where lobbyist comments — on health-care research, vaccine services, and other provisions — were translated directly into microlegislation in the form of amendments. And she found that those groups’ financial contributions to specific senators on the committee increased the amendments’ chances of passing.

Her finding that lobbying works was no surprise. More important, McKay’s work demonstrated that computer models can predict the likely fate of proposed legislative amendments, as well as the paths by which lobbyists can most effectively secure their desired outcomes. And that turns out to be a critical piece of creating an AI lobbyist.

Lobbying has long been part of the give-and-take among human policymakers and advocates working to balance their competing interests. The danger of microlegislation — a danger greatly exacerbated by AI — is that it can be used in a way that makes it difficult to figure out who the legislation truly benefits.

Another word for a strategy like this is a “hack.” Hacks follow the rules of a system but subvert their intent. Hacking is often associated with computer systems, but the concept is also applicable to social systems like financial markets, tax codes, and legislative processes.

While the idea of monied interests incorporating AI assistive technologies into their lobbying remains hypothetical, specific machine-learning technologies exist today that would enable them to do so. We should expect these techniques to get better and their utilization to grow, just as we’ve seen in so many other domains.

Here’s how it might work.

Crafting an AI microlegislator

To make microlegislation, machine-learning systems must be able to uncover the smallest modification that could be made to a bill or existing law that would make the biggest impact on a narrow interest.

There are three basic challenges involved. First, you must create a policy proposal — small suggested changes to legal text — and anticipate whether or not a human reader would recognize the alteration as substantive. This is important; a change that isn’t detectable is more likely to pass without controversy. Second, you need to do an impact assessment to project the implications of that change for the short- or long-range financial interests of companies. Third, you need a lobbying strategizer to identify what levers of power to pull to get the best proposal into law.

Existing AI tools can tackle all three of these.

The first step, the policy proposal, leverages the core function of generative AI. Large language models, the sort that have been used for general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT, can easily be adapted to write like a native in different specialized domains after seeing a relatively small number of examples. This process is called fine-tuning. For example, a model “pre-trained” on a large library of generic text samples from books and the internet can be “fine-tuned” to work effectively on medical literature, computer science papers, and product reviews.

Given this flexibility and capacity for adaptation, a large language model could be fine-tuned to produce draft legislative texts, given a data set of previously offered amendments and the bills they were associated with. Training data is available. At the federal level, it’s provided by the US Government Publishing Office, and there are already tools for downloading and interacting with it. Most other jurisdictions provide similar data feeds, and there are even convenient assemblages of that data.

Meanwhile, large language models like the one underlying ChatGPT are routinely used for summarizing long, complex documents (even laws and computer code) to capture the essential points, and they are optimized to match human expectations. This capability could allow an AI assistant to automatically predict how detectable the true effect of a policy insertion may be to a human reader.

Today, it can take a highly paid team of human lobbyists days or weeks to generate and analyze alternative pieces of microlegislation on behalf of a client. With AI assistance, that could be done instantaneously and cheaply. This opens the door to dramatic increases in the scope of this kind of microlegislating, with a potential to scale across any number of bills in any jurisdiction.

Teaching machines to assess impact

Impact assessment is more complicated. There is a rich series of methods for quantifying the predicted outcome of a decision or policy, and then also optimizing the return under that model. This kind of approach goes by different names in different circles — mathematical programming in management science, utility maximization in economics, and rational design in the life sciences.

To train an AI to do this, we would need to specify some way to calculate the benefit to different parties as a result of a policy choice. That could mean estimating the financial return to different companies under a few different scenarios of taxation or regulation. Economists are skilled at building risk models like this, and companies are already required to formulate and disclose regulatory compliance risk factors to investors. Such a mathematical model could translate directly into a reward function, a grading system that could provide feedback for the model used to create policy proposals and direct the process of training it.

The real challenge in impact assessment for generative AI models would be to parse the textual output of a model like ChatGPT in terms that an economic model could readily use. Automating this would require extracting structured financial information from the draft amendment or any legalese surrounding it. This kind of information extraction, too, is an area where AI has a long history; for example, AI systems have been trained to recognize clinical details in doctors’ notes. Early indications are that large language models are fairly good at recognizing financial information in texts such as investor call transcripts. While it remains an open challenge in the field, they may even be capable of writing out multi-step plans based on descriptions in free text.

Machines as strategists

The last piece of the puzzle is a lobbying strategizer to figure out what actions to take to convince lawmakers to adopt the amendment.

Passing legislation requires a keen understanding of the complex interrelated networks of legislative offices, outside groups, executive agencies, and other stakeholders vying to serve their own interests. Each actor in this network has a baseline perspective and different factors that influence that point of view. For example, a legislator may be moved by seeing an allied stakeholder take a firm position, or by a negative news story, or by a campaign contribution.

It turns out that AI developers are very experienced at modeling these kinds of networks. Machine-learning models for network graphs have been built, refined, improved, and iterated by hundreds of researchers working on incredibly diverse problems: lidar scans used to guide self-driving cars, the chemical functions of molecular structures, the capture of motion in actors’ joints for computer graphics, behaviors in social networks, and more.

In the context of AI-assisted lobbying, political actors like legislators and lobbyists are nodes on a graph, just like users in a social network. Relations between them are graph edges, like social connections. Information can be passed along those edges, like messages sent to a friend or campaign contributions made to a member. AI models can use past examples to learn to estimate how that information changes the network. Calculating the likelihood that a campaign contribution of a given size will flip a legislator’s vote on an amendment is one application.

McKay’s work has already shown us that there are significant, predictable relationships between these actions and the outcomes of legislation, and that the work of discovering those can be automated. Others have shown that graphs of neural network models like those described above can be applied to political systems. The full-scale use of these technologies to guide lobbying strategy is theoretical, but plausible.

Put together, these three components could create an automatic system for generating profitable microlegislation. The policy proposal system would create millions, even billions, of possible amendments. The impact assessor would identify the few that promise to be most profitable to the client. And the lobbying strategy tool would produce a blueprint for getting them passed.

What remains is for human lobbyists to walk the floors of the Capitol or state house, and perhaps supply some cash to grease the wheels. These final two aspects of lobbying — access and financing — cannot be supplied by the AI tools we envision. This suggests that lobbying will continue to primarily benefit those who are already influential and wealthy, and AI assistance will amplify their existing advantages.

The transformative benefit that AI offers to lobbyists and their clients is scale. While individual lobbyists tend to focus on the federal level or a single state, with AI assistance they could more easily infiltrate a large number of state-level (or even local-level) law-making bodies and elections. At that level, where the average cost of a seat is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars instead of millions, a single donor can wield a lot of influence — if automation makes it possible to coordinate lobbying across districts.

How to stop them

When it comes to combating the potentially adverse effects of assistive AI, the first response always seems to be to try to detect whether or not content was AI-generated. We could imagine a defensive AI that detects anomalous lobbyist spending associated with amendments that benefit the contributing group. But by then, the damage might already be done.

In general, methods for detecting the work of AI tend not to keep pace with its ability to generate convincing content. And these strategies won’t be implemented by AIs alone. The lobbyists will still be humans who take the results of an AI microlegislator and further refine the computer’s strategies. These hybrid human-AI systems will not be detectable from their output.

But the good news is: the same strategies that have long been used to combat misbehavior by human lobbyists can still be effective when those lobbyists get an AI assist. We don’t need to reinvent our democracy to stave off the worst risks of AI; we just need to more fully implement long-standing ideals.

First, we should reduce the dependence of legislatures on monolithic, multi-thousand-page omnibus bills voted on under deadline. This style of legislating exploded in the 1980s and 1990s and continues through to the most recent federal budget bill. Notwithstanding their legitimate benefits to the political system, omnibus bills present an obvious and proven vehicle for inserting unnoticed provisions that may later surprise the same legislators who approved them.

The issue is not that individual legislators need more time to read and understand each bill (that isn’t realistic or even necessary). It’s that omnibus bills must pass. There is an imperative to pass a federal budget bill, and so the capacity to push back on individual provisions that may seem deleterious (or just impertinent) to any particular group is small. Bills that are too big to fail are ripe for hacking by microlegislation.

Moreover, the incentive for legislators to introduce microlegislation catering to a narrow interest is greater if the threat of exposure is lower. To strengthen the threat of exposure for misbehaving legislative sponsors, bills should focus more tightly on individual substantive areas and, after the introduction of amendments, allow more time before the committee and floor votes. During this time, we should encourage public review and testimony to provide greater oversight.

Second, we should strengthen disclosure requirements on lobbyists, whether they’re entirely human or AI-assisted. State laws regarding lobbying disclosure are a hodgepodge. North Dakota, for example, only requires lobbying reports to be filed annually, so that by the time a disclosure is made, the policy is likely already decided. A lobbying disclosure scorecard created by Open Secrets, a group researching the influence of money in US politics, tracks nine states that do not even require lobbyists to report their compensation.

Ideally, it would be great for the public to see all communication between lobbyists and legislators, whether it takes the form of a proposed amendment or not. Absent that, let’s give the public the benefit of reviewing what lobbyists are lobbying for — and why. Lobbying is traditionally an activity that happens behind closed doors. Right now, many states reinforce that: they actually exempt testimony delivered publicly to a legislature from being reported as lobbying.

In those jurisdictions, if you reveal your position to the public, you’re no longer lobbying. Let’s do the inverse: require lobbyists to reveal their positions on issues. Some jurisdictions already require a statement of position (a ‘yea’ or ‘nay’) from registered lobbyists. And in most (but not all) states, you could make a public records request regarding meetings held with a state legislator and hope to get something substantive back. But we can expect more — lobbyists could be required to proactively publish, within a few days, a brief summary of what they demanded of policymakers during meetings and why they believe it’s in the general interest.

We can’t rely on corporations to be forthcoming and wholly honest about the reasons behind their lobbying positions. But having them on the record about their intentions would at least provide a baseline for accountability.

Finally, consider the role AI assistive technologies may have on lobbying firms themselves and the labor market for lobbyists. Many observers are rightfully concerned about the possibility of AI replacing or devaluing the human labor it automates. If the automating potential of AI ends up commodifying the work of political strategizing and message development, it may indeed put some professionals on K Street out of work.

But don’t expect that to disrupt the careers of the most astronomically compensated lobbyists: former members Congress and other insiders who have passed through the revolving door. There is no shortage of reform ideas for limiting the ability of government officials turned lobbyists to sell access to their colleagues still in government, and they should be adopted and — equally important — maintained and enforced in successive Congresses and administrations.

None of these solutions are really original, specific to the threats posed by AI, or even predominantly focused on microlegislation — and that’s the point. Good governance should and can be robust to threats from a variety of techniques and actors.

But what makes the risks posed by AI especially pressing now is how fast the field is developing. We expect the scale, strategies, and effectiveness of humans engaged in lobbying to evolve over years and decades. Advancements in AI, meanwhile, seem to be making impressive breakthroughs at a much faster pace — and it’s still accelerating.

The legislative process is a constant struggle between parties trying to control the rules of our society as they are updated, rewritten, and expanded at the federal, state, and local levels. Lobbying is an important tool for balancing various interests through our system. If it’s well-regulated, perhaps lobbying can support policymakers in making equitable decisions on behalf of us all.

This article was co-written with Nathan E. Sanders and originally appeared in MIT Technology Review.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

[2023.03.14] This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking on “How to Reclaim Power in the Digital World” at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, March 16, 2023, at 5:30 PM CET.
  • I’ll be discussing my new book A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on Friday, March 31, 2023, at 6:00 PM EDT.
  • I’ll be discussing my book A Hacker’s Mind with Julia Angwin at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City, on Thursday, April 6, 2023, at 6:30 PM EDT. Register here
  • I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023, at 8:30 AM CEST.

The list is maintained on this page.

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US Citizen Hacked by Spyware

[2023.03.21] The New York Times is reporting that a US citizen’s phone was hacked by Predator spyware.

A U.S. and Greek national who worked on Meta’s security and trust team while based in Greece was placed under a yearlong wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and hacked with a powerful cyberespionage tool, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and officials with knowledge of the case.

The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece. It demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation.

The simultaneous tapping of the target’s phone by the national intelligence service and the way she was hacked indicate that the spy service and whoever implanted the spyware, known as Predator, were working hand in hand.

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ChatGPT Privacy Flaw

[2023.03.22] OpenAI has disabled ChatGPT’s privacy history, almost certainly because it had a security flaw where users were seeing each others’ histories.

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Mass Ransomware Attack

[2023.03.23] A vulnerability in a popular data transfer tool has resulted in a mass ransomware attack:

TechCrunch has learned of dozens of organizations that used the affected GoAnywhere file transfer software at the time of the ransomware attack, suggesting more victims are likely to come forward.

However, while the number of victims of the mass-hack is widening, the known impact is murky at best.

Since the attack in late January or early February — the exact date is not known — Clop has disclosed less than half of the 130 organizations it claimed to have compromised via GoAnywhere, a system that can be hosted in the cloud or on an organization’s network that allows companies to securely transfer huge sets of data and other large files.

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Exploding USB Sticks

[2023.03.24] In case you don’t have enough to worry about, people are hiding explosives — actual ones — in USB sticks:

In the port city of Guayaquil, journalist Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa private TV station received an envelope containing a pen drive which exploded when he inserted it into a computer, his employer said.

Artieda sustained slight injuries to one hand and his face, said police official Xavier Chango. No one else was hurt.

Chango said the USB drive sent to Artieda could have been loaded with RDX, a military-type explosive.

More:

According to police official Xavier Chango, the flash drive that went off had a 5-volt explosive charge and is thought to have used RDX. Also known as T4, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (PDF), militaries, including the US’s, use RDX, which “can be used alone as a base charge for detonators or mixed with other explosives, such as TNT.” Chango said it comes in capsules measuring about 1 cm, but only half of it was activated in the drive that Artieda plugged in, which likely saved him some harm.

Reminds me of assassination by cell phone.

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A Hacker’s Mind News

[2023.03.24] My latest book continues to sell well. Its ranking hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 on Amazon. It’s been spied in airports.

Reviews are consistently good. I have been enjoying giving podcast interviews. It all feels pretty good right now.

You can order a signed book from me here.

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Hacks at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023

[2023.03.27] An impressive array of hacks were demonstrated at the first day of the Pwn2Own conference in Vancouver:

On the first day of Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023, security researchers successfully demoed Tesla Model 3, Windows 11, and macOS zero-day exploits and exploit chains to win $375,000 and a Tesla Model 3.

The first to fall was Adobe Reader in the enterprise applications category after Haboob SA’s Abdul Aziz Hariri (@abdhariri) used an exploit chain targeting a 6-bug logic chain abusing multiple failed patches which escaped the sandbox and bypassed a banned API list on macOS to earn $50,000.

The STAR Labs team (@starlabs_sg) demoed a zero-day exploit chain targeting Microsoft’s SharePoint team collaboration platform that brought them a $100,000 reward and successfully hacked Ubuntu Desktop with a previously known exploit for $15,000.

Synacktiv (@Synacktiv) took home $100,000 and a Tesla Model 3 after successfully executing a TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) attack against the Tesla-Gateway in the Automotive category. They also used a TOCTOU zero-day vulnerability to escalate privileges on Apple macOS and earned $40,000.

Oracle VirtualBox was hacked using an OOB Read and a stacked-based buffer overflow exploit chain (worth $40,000) by Qrious Security’s Bien Pham (@bienpnn).

Last but not least, Marcin Wiązowski elevated privileges on Windows 11 using an improper input validation zero-day that came with a $30,000 prize.

The con’s second and third days were equally impressive.

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Security Vulnerabilities in Snipping Tools

[2023.03.28] Both Google’s Pixel’s Markup Tool and the Windows Snipping Tool have vulnerabilities that allow people to partially recover content that was edited out of images.

EDITED TO ADD (4/14): Steven Murdoch has a good explanation as to why this happened — and to two very different snipping tools.

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The Security Vulnerabilities of Message Interoperability

[2023.03.29] Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other:

The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a real Pandora’s box. How will the networks manage keys, authenticate users, and moderate content? How much metadata will have to be shared, and how?

In our latest paper, One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging, we explore the security tensions, the conflicts of interest, the usability traps, and the likely consequences for individual and institutional behaviour.

Interoperability will vastly increase the attack surface at every level in the stack from the cryptography up through usability to commercial incentives and the opportunities for government interference.

It’s a good idea in theory, but will likely result in the overall security being the worst of each platform’s security.

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Russian Cyberwarfare Documents Leaked

[2023.03.30] Now this is interesting:

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet.

The company’s work is linked to the federal security service or FSB, the domestic spy agency; the operational and intelligence divisions of the armed forces, known as the GOU and GRU; and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence organisation.

Lots more at the link.

The documents are in Russian, so it will be a while before we get translations.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): More information.

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UK Runs Fake DDoS-for-Hire Sites

[2023.04.03] Brian Krebs is reporting that the UK’s National Crime Agency is setting up fake DDoS-for-hire sites as part of a sting operation:

The NCA says all of its fake so-called “booter” or “stresser” sites – which have so far been accessed by several thousand people — have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks.

“However, after users register, rather than being given access to cyber crime tools, their data is collated by investigators,” reads an NCA advisory on the program. “Users based in the UK will be contacted by the National Crime Agency or police and warned about engaging in cyber crime. Information relating to those based overseas is being passed to international law enforcement.”

The NCA declined to say how many phony booter sites it had set up, or for how long they have been running. The NCA says hiring or launching attacks designed to knock websites or users offline is punishable in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

“Going forward, people who wish to use these services can’t be sure who is actually behind them, so why take the risk?” the NCA announcement continues.

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North Korea Hacking Cryptocurrency Sites with 3CX Exploit

[2023.04.04] News:

Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack that’s unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim companies, but it notes that they’re based in “western Asia.”

Security firms CrowdStrike and SentinelOne last week pinned the operation on North Korean hackers, who compromised 3CX installer software that’s used by 600,000 organizations worldwide, according to the vendor. Despite the potentially massive breadth of that attack, which SentinelOne dubbed “Smooth Operator,” Kaspersky has now found that the hackers combed through the victims infected with its corrupted software to ultimately target fewer than 10 machines — at least as far as Kaspersky could observe so far — and that they seemed to be focusing on cryptocurrency firms with “surgical precision.”

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FBI (and Others) Shut Down Genesis Market

[2023.04.05] Genesis Market is shut down:

Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan was, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.

But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems.

The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Slashdot story.

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Research on AI in Adversarial Settings

[2023.04.06] New research: “Achilles Heels for AGI/ASI via Decision Theoretic Adversaries”:

As progress in AI continues to advance, it is important to know how advanced systems will make choices and in what ways they may fail. Machines can already outsmart humans in some domains, and understanding how to safely build ones which may have capabilities at or above the human level is of particular concern. One might suspect that artificially generally intelligent (AGI) and artificially superintelligent (ASI) will be systems that humans cannot reliably outsmart. As a challenge to this assumption, this paper presents the Achilles Heel hypothesis which states that even a potentially superintelligent system may nonetheless have stable decision-theoretic delusions which cause them to make irrational decisions in adversarial settings. In a survey of key dilemmas and paradoxes from the decision theory literature, a number of these potential Achilles Heels are discussed in context of this hypothesis. Several novel contributions are made toward understanding the ways in which these weaknesses might be implanted into a system.

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LLMs and Phishing

[2023.04.10] Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to vary wildly based on the details of the experiment.

But while it’s an easy experiment to run, it misses the real risk of large language models (LLMs) writing scam emails. Today’s human-run scams aren’t limited by the number of people who respond to the initial email contact. They’re limited by the labor-intensive process of persuading those people to send the scammer money. LLMs are about to change that. A decade ago, one type of spam email had become a punchline on every late-night show: “I am the son of the late king of Nigeria in need of your assistance….” Nearly everyone had gotten one or a thousand of those emails, to the point that it seemed everyone must have known they were scams.

So why were scammers still sending such obviously dubious emails? In 2012, researcher Cormac Herley offered an answer: It weeded out all but the most gullible. A smart scammer doesn’t want to waste their time with people who reply and then realize it’s a scam when asked to wire money. By using an obvious scam email, the scammer can focus on the most potentially profitable people. It takes time and effort to engage in the back-and-forth communications that nudge marks, step by step, from interlocutor to trusted acquaintance to pauper.

Long-running financial scams are now known as pig butchering, growing the potential mark up until their ultimate and sudden demise. Such scams, which require gaining trust and infiltrating a target’s personal finances, take weeks or even months of personal time and repeated interactions. It’s a high stakes and low probability game that the scammer is playing.

Here is where LLMs will make a difference. Much has been written about the unreliability of OpenAI’s GPT models and those like them: They “hallucinate” frequently, making up things about the world and confidently spouting nonsense. For entertainment, this is fine, but for most practical uses it’s a problem. It is, however, not a bug but a feature when it comes to scams: LLMs’ ability to confidently roll with the punches, no matter what a user throws at them, will prove useful to scammers as they navigate hostile, bemused, and gullible scam targets by the billions. AI chatbot scams can ensnare more people, because the pool of victims who will fall for a more subtle and flexible scammer — one that has been trained on everything ever written online — is much larger than the pool of those who believe the king of Nigeria wants to give them a billion dollars.

Personal computers are powerful enough today that they can run compact LLMs. After Facebook’s new model, LLaMA, was leaked online, developers tuned it to run fast and cheaply on powerful laptops. Numerous other open-source LLMs are under development, with a community of thousands of engineers and scientists.

A single scammer, from their laptop anywhere in the world, can now run hundreds or thousands of scams in parallel, night and day, with marks all over the world, in every language under the sun. The AI chatbots will never sleep and will always be adapting along their path to their objectives. And new mechanisms, from ChatGPT plugins to LangChain, will enable composition of AI with thousands of API-based cloud services and open source tools, allowing LLMs to interact with the internet as humans do. The impersonations in such scams are no longer just princes offering their country’s riches. They are forlorn strangers looking for romance, hot new cryptocurrencies that are soon to skyrocket in value, and seemingly-sound new financial websites offering amazing returns on deposits. And people are already falling in love with LLMs.

This is a change in both scope and scale. LLMs will change the scam pipeline, making them more profitable than ever. We don’t know how to live in a world with a billion, or 10 billion, scammers that never sleep.

There will also be a change in the sophistication of these attacks. This is due not only to AI advances, but to the business model of the internet — surveillance capitalism — which produces troves of data about all of us, available for purchase from data brokers. Targeted attacks against individuals, whether for phishing or data collection or scams, were once only within the reach of nation-states. Combine the digital dossiers that data brokers have on all of us with LLMs, and you have a tool tailor-made for personalized scams.

Companies like OpenAI attempt to prevent their models from doing bad things. But with the release of each new LLM, social media sites buzz with new AI jailbreaks that evade the new restrictions put in place by the AI’s designers. ChatGPT, and then Bing Chat, and then GPT-4 were all jailbroken within minutes of their release, and in dozens of different ways. Most protections against bad uses and harmful output are only skin-deep, easily evaded by determined users. Once a jailbreak is discovered, it usually can be generalized, and the community of users pulls the LLM open through the chinks in its armor. And the technology is advancing too fast for anyone to fully understand how they work, even the designers.

This is all an old story, though: It reminds us that many of the bad uses of AI are a reflection of humanity more than they are a reflection of AI technology itself. Scams are nothing new — simply intent and then action of one person tricking another for personal gain. And the use of others as minions to accomplish scams is sadly nothing new or uncommon: For example, organized crime in Asia currently kidnaps or indentures thousands in scam sweatshops. Is it better that organized crime will no longer see the need to exploit and physically abuse people to run their scam operations, or worse that they and many others will be able to scale up scams to an unprecedented level?

Defense can and will catch up, but before it does, our signal-to-noise ratio is going to drop dramatically.

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and previously appeared on Wired.com.

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Car Thieves Hacking the CAN Bus

[2023.04.11] Car thieves are injecting malicious software into a car’s network through wires in the headlights (or taillights) that fool the car into believing that the electronic key is nearby.

News articles.

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FBI Advising People to Avoid Public Charging Stations

[2023.04.12] The FBI is warning people against using public phone-charging stations, worrying that the combination power-data port can be used to inject malware onto the devices:

Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers. Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices that access these ports. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead.

How much of a risk is this, really? I am unconvinced, although I do carry a USB condom for charging stations I find suspicious.

News article.

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Bypassing a Theft Threat Model

[2023.04.13] Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process.

I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318):

My favorite example is a band of California art thieves that would break into people’s houses by cutting a hole in their walls with a chainsaw. The attacker completely bypassed the threat model of the defender. The countermeasures that the homeowner put in place were door and window alarms; they didn’t make a difference to this attack.

The article says they took half a million dollars worth of iPhones. I don’t understand iPhone device security, but don’t they have a system of denying stolen phones access to the network?

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): A commenter says: “Locked idevices will still sell for 40-60% of their value on eBay and co, they will go to Chinese shops to be stripped for parts. A aftermarket ‘oem-quality’ iPhone 14 display is $400+ alone on ifixit.”

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Gaining an Advantage in Roulette

[2023.04.14] You can beat the game without a computer:

On a perfect [roulette] wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel that’s even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a ‘drop zone.’ When the tilt forces the ball to climb a slope, the ball decelerates and falls from the outer rim at the same spot on almost every spin. A similar thing can happen on equipment worn from repeated use, or if a croupier’s hand lotion has left residue, or for a dizzying number of other reasons. A drop zone is the Achilles’ heel of roulette. That morsel of predictability is enough for software to overcome the random skidding and bouncing that happens after the drop.”

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Hacking Suicide

[2023.04.14] Here’s a religious hack:

You want to commit suicide, but it’s a mortal sin: your soul goes straight to hell, forever. So what you do is murder someone. That will get you executed, but if you confess your sins to a priest beforehand you avoid hell. Problem solved.

This was actually a problem in the 17th and 18th centuries in Northern Europe, particularly Denmark. And it remained a problem until capital punishment was abolished for murder.

It’s a clever hack. I didn’t learn about it in time to put it in my book, A Hacker’s Mind, but I have several other good hacks of religious rules.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

[2023.04.14] This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

  • I’m speaking on “Cybersecurity Thinking to Reinvent Democracy” at RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at 9:40 AM PT.
  • I’m speaking at IT-S Now 2023 in Vienna, Austria, on June 2, 2023 at 8:30 AM CEST.

The list is maintained on this page.

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Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security technology. To subscribe, or to read back issues, see Crypto-Gram’s web page.

You can also read these articles on my blog, Schneier on Security.

Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by the Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books — including his latest, A Hacker’s Mind — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His newsletter and blog are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.

Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Schneier.

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Bruce Schneier · Harvard Kennedy School · 1 Brattle Square · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA

May 312023
 

 

As part of the proposed Pandemic Treaty, the WHO has for the first time said that it’s going to prioritize restricting civil liberties. While we all know they’ve been pushing for this for some years, this is the first time they’ve openly admitted it directly.

 

AN ADMISSION

 

 

WHO Group Co-Chair Calls For “Prioritizing Actions That May Restrict Individual Liberties”

 

During a meeting last week, a co-chair of a World Health Organization (WHO) working group that’s focused on international law amendments that would increase the WHO’s powers, took the power grab a step further by urging members to prioritize “actions that may restrict individual liberties.”

The co-chair of the WHO’s working group on amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), Dr. Abdullah Assiri, made the comments during a strategic roundtable at the seventy-sixth World World Health Assembly (an annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body).

During the strategic roundtable, WHO members discussed the international pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations — two instruments that will collectively expand the WHO’s powers to target “misinformation,” increase its surveillance powers, and push global vaccine passports.

Assiri provided an update on the WHO’s progress with the IHR amendments before suggesting that individual liberties should be curtailed by this unelected health agency.

“The world, however, requires different legal mandates, such as the pandemic treaty, to navigate through a particular pandemic, should one occur, and it will,” Assiri said. “Prioritizing actions that may restrict individual liberties, mandating and sharing of information, knowledge, and resources, and most importantly, providing fund for pandemic control efforts are all necessary during a pandemic. The means to carry out these actions are simply not…currently at hand.”

Watch the video here.

While the sweeping new powers contained within the pandemic treaty and amendments to the IHR do curb individual liberties, such as privacy and free speech, WHO officials have previously refrained from admitting this directly.

Assiri’s comments are the latest of many examples of the WHO continuing to demand more power, despite the unelected health agency already gaining significant influence during the pandemic.

Since 2020, the WHO has partnered with YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia and had a direct impact on the speech rules on these platforms. Google renewed its partnership with the WHO last month.

Yet despite already having major influence over online speech, the WHO pushed for even more power in 2021 (when work began on the international pandemic treaty) and 2022 (when the Biden administration proposed amendments to the IHR).

The WHO’s power grab has faced pushback from politicians in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Europe. However, it continues to move forward and the WHO is planning to finalize the pandemic treaty and IHR amendments by May 2024.

If adopted, the pandemic treaty will apply to the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of the world’s countries) and the IHR amendments will apply to 196 countries. Both instruments are legally binding under international law.

 

CRITICIZING MEMES

 

 

Lawmakers Want To Restrict AI To Licensed Companies

 

Politicians that plan to regulate AI have used the increase in AI memes as a call to justify the idea that AI companies need to be licensed by the government before they can operate.

We break down their plans today.

Watch our video report on YT here.

Watch our video report on Rumble h​​ere.

 

MICROSOFT’S BIG IDEA

 

 

Microsoft President Wants It To Be Illegal To Remove AI Watermark Microsoft And Others Are Developing

 

Microsoft’s president and vice chairman Brad Smith has made some bold statements about how he expects the US government to regulate artificial intelligence in the next year. He made the remarks in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Smith wants it to be “unlawful” to remove the AI metadata that Microsoft and others are developing. Microsoft is also developing technology to be able to detect when the watermark is removed.

Watch the video here.

“We’ll need a system that we and so many others have been working to develop that protects content, that puts a watermark on it, so that if somebody alters it, if somebody removes the watermark, if they do that to try to deceive or defraud someone, first of all, they’re doing something that the law makes unlawful. We may need some new law to do that,” Smith said.

“But second, we can then use the power of AI to detect when that happens. So that means a news organization like CBS would have video that somehow could be identified. And I would guess and hope that CBS will be absolutely at the forefront of this.”

The president of the Big Tech behemoth explained that metadata within a file will identify when an image or video is AI generated and said that it should be illegal to remove it.

“You embed what we call metadata. It’s part of the file. If it’s removed, we’re able to detect it. If there’s an altered version, we in effect create a hash. Think of it like the fingerprint of something and then can look for that fingerprint across the internet.”

Smith said he wants the US to increase the pace of AI regulation.
“I was in Japan just three weeks ago, and they have a national A.I. strategy. The government has adopted it,” Smith said. “The world is moving forward. Let’s make sure that the United States at least keeps pace with the rest of the world.”

 

NEW THREAT

 

 

EU Threatens Twitter Over “Disinformation” – “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide”

 

On Friday, the European Union’s Internal Markets Commissioner, Thierry Breton, confirmed that Twitter had ditched the EU’s code of practice on disinformation. He warned that the platform cannot “hide” from obligations to censor content.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Breton threatened in a tweet.

“Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under DSA as of August 25,” Breton continued. “Our teams will be ready for enforcement.”

Breton was referring to the censorship law, the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), a new set of rules for social media platforms operating in Europe, which require them to actively police content or risk fines of up to 6% of global turnover.

 

 

The current code of practice, which is voluntary, includes obligations for social media to stop the monetization of “disinformation,” monitor political advertising, and allow third-parties to access their algorithms.

In February, Twitter did not submit a report on its implementation of the code. It was the only major platform to fail to do so.

Unlike the code of practice, the DSA is legally binding, and large platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, will have to comply with it if they want to operate in Europe.

In previous tweets, Breton has indicated that he will hold Twitter owner Elon Musk to account for the platform’s failures to comply with the content rules in the EU.

 

BLACKLISTS

 

 

News Corp CEO Says Political Prejudices At Advertising Agencies Affect Demonetization Of Some News Outlets

 

CEO of global media organization News Corp, Robert Thomson, said that he had discovered that staff at advertising agencies were allowing personal “political prejudices” to guide their work. He made the remarks at the International News Media Association (INMA) World Congress of News Media in New York.

“I asked the chief executive of one of the world largest companies why he had an ad ban against the New York Post … (with around 158 million monthly uniques),” he said, according to The Australian.

“The chief exec said he was completely unaware of any such ban – so he checked, and to his genuine and annoyed surprise, a hyper-politicized agency flunkey had a Post prohibition.

“The medium may be the message but unless we are more assertive and there is more transparency, certain advertising agencies will indulge their worst instincts, ad nauseam.”

Thomson said that the frustration with the Global Disinformation Index, a firm funded by the US and UK that provides blacklists of conservative websites to advertisers, was justifiable.

“These arrogant armchair amateurs have undue influence on ad spend by agencies and companies,” he said.

“No masthead is immune to sudden, capricious changes in algorithmic ranking that can affect your ad revenue.”

 

BLACKLISTS

 

 

“Pre Crime”-Style AI That Monitors Kids Hits Dallas Schools

 

The Dallas Independent School District is rolling out AI-equipped cameras to spy on students, violating privacy under the pretense of keeping them safe.

The school district partnered with a company called Davista to use AI to monitor each student and notify the administration if a student deviates from their “baseline” behavior.

The press release announcing the technology stated: “This initiative will utilize Davista’s Heimdall platform, a breakthrough technology that empowers organizations to identify risk and take action before the projected risk becomes a consequential event or incident.

“Davista’s student safety and support platform enables comprehensive analysis and review of student data through software, minimizing inherent human biases and disparities by objectively assessing data points and reducing assumptions and cognitive fatigue. Leveraging existing data within the school, the technology pays attention to students’ participation, performance, and behavioral patterns. This process establishes a baseline for each student, derived from their past information, allowing real-time analysis of any deviations from their personal baseline.”

 

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