After Blocking Zero Hedge And Others, NZ Telcos Demand Big-Tech Censorship Surge To “Protect Consumers”

 

In the wake of last week’s terror attacks at two New Zealand mosques which left 50 dead, several websites which either reported on the incident, hosted footage of the attacks, or have simply allowed people to engage in uncensored discussion such as Dissenter or Zero Hedge, have been partially or completely blocked in both New Zealand and Australia for the sake of “protecting consumers,” according to the CEOs of three New Zealand telcos.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting – which was broadcast over Facebook Live by accused gunman Brenton Tarrant to an initial audience of just 200 viewers (none of whom reported it) and had 4,000 overall views before it was taken down – Facebook deleted 1.5 million videos of the attack, of which 1.2 million were blocked at the time of upload.

Two Roads Diverged in a Digital Wood

The fact Facebook continues to exist and earn billions of dollars is proof we’re an apathetic, demoralized society which enjoys being abused.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 30, 2019

 

By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.

– From the must read piece: ‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

A lot of my content over the past couple of years has focused on the momentous geopolitical changes I see on the horizon, and this macro perspective reaches two significant conclusions. First, that the planet is moving away from a unipolar world dominated almost entirely by the U.S. toward a more multi-polar world. Second, that this fundamental shift in geopolitical landscape, coupled with what appears to be a forthcoming reckoning with the largest global debt bubble in human history, will lead to a once in a generation reset of the world economy and the global financial system that keeps it functioning.

Is There Enough of America Left To Be Saved?

As many readers of this website have noticed, the United States has lost its character and become a dysfunctional society. In place of a largely homogeneous population once united in veneration of the Constitution, there exists today massive diversity which Identity Politics has used to disunite the population into separate interest groups.

No clause or article of the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights, is safe. The George W. Bush and Obama regimes destroyed two of the most important protections of civil liberty—habeas corpus and due process. Bush declared indefinite imprisonment on suspicion alone without evidence or trial. Obama declared execution of US citizens on accusation alone without due process. The Justice (sic) Department wrote legal memos justifying torture, thus destroying the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. One of the authors of the memos is now a professor of law at UC Berkeley. The other is now a federal judge, indications that respect for the Constitution and enforcement of US and international laws against torture is fading in law schools and the federal judiciary.

China Industrial Policy Seeks to Steal ‘Crown Jewels’ of U.S. Tech

Getty Images

 

White House exposes Chinese economic aggression

China’s government is using a multi-pronged strategy to systematically steal advanced American technology as part of economic aggression against the United States, according to a White House report.

The report, based in part on declassified intelligence from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, provides some of the first public details on China’s industrial policies that have produced the world’s second largest economy, often at the expense of American companies.

Facebook shared user data with Chinese firm despite warnings by US intelligence

 

The online social media company Facebook shares data about its users with a Chinese telecommunications company that has been flagged in United States government reports as a threat to security. The New York Times revealed on Tuesday that Facebook has been routinely giving access to the private data of its users to four Chinese companies since at least 2010. The paper said that the data-sharing agreement with Lenovo, Oppo, TCL, and Huawei Technologies, has its roots in 2007. That was the year when Facebook began an effort to entice cell phone hardware and software manufacturers to include Facebook-friendly apps and features in their products. As part of the agreement, Facebook gave cell phone manufacturers access to its users’ private data, including “religious and political leanings, work and education history and relationship status”, said the Times.

CNN’s Undisclosed Ties To Fusion GPS

Neil King is seen on the left, in a photo posted by CNN reporter Evan Perez. (Screenshot/Facebook)

 

CNN’s reporting on the Trump-Russia dossier has left out at least one crucial fact: the close ties between the network and the opposition research firm at the center of the dossier controversy.

CNN’s reporting on the dossier, led by justice correspondent Evan Perez, has been favorable to the firm, Fusion GPS, and hyped the dossier’s credibility. Left out of Perez’s reporting, which has relied largely on unnamed sources, is his personal closeness to Fusion GPS’ operatives. Fusion has repeatedly been described in Senate testimonies as a smear-for-hire operation that manufactures misleading or false media narratives for its clients.

Glenn Simpson, the Fusion co-founder most often associated with the dossier, is used to working on stories with Perez. As reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Perez and Simpson regularly co-authored stories on national security.

Democratic Missouri Senator: “I Hope Trump Is Assassinated!”

 

A Missouri state senator, Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D-University City), has landed herself in a bit of hot water with with the U.S. Secret Service today after posting, then deleting, a comment on Facebook which read, “I hope Trump is assassinated!”

Unfortunately, as Chappelle-Nadal should have learned at this point in her life, the internet never forgets and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch managed to get their hands on the post: (See above image)

Gestapo is Back: German Homes Raided Over Facebook Posts

 

Germany has taken its war on “hate speech,” also known as free speech, to the people.

Already Germany has pretty strict laws against citizens using Nazi symbols and denying that the Holocaust happened. Apparently, lawmakers miss the irony of going full Gestapo on citizens for free speech, as offensive as it may be.

Memo Signed By Assad Transfers Command And Financial Responsibility For Syrian Militias To Iran

 

Throughout the Syria war, Iran has played a central role in establishing the Syrian militias operating alongside the Syrian regime’s regular army and army reserves. These militias are modeled after the Iranian Basij.[1] Recently, a memo was circulated on Facebook ostensibly proving that the Syrian regime is transferring command and financial responsibility for some of these militias to Iran – reflecting the extent of Iran’s control in Syria.

The memo, which is dated April 11, 2017 and bears the signature of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in his capacity as commander in-chief of the Syrian armed forces, approves the recommendations of a committee responsible for regulating the activity of the armed Syrian forces operating in conjunction with Iran on Syrian territory.

The committee’s recommendations included a call for organizing the nearly 90,000-man-strong armed Syrian forces working in conjunction with Iran under an umbrella framework called the Local Defense Brigades, to operate across Syria under Iranian command and financial responsibility, “until the end of the crisis in Syria or until further notice.”

A Survival Guide for the Coming AI Revolution

In computer vision, features are the parts of an image that are used to classify an object. For example, the nose, ears and tail may be used as features to distinguish that a picture is a cat. (Modified from pixabay.com)

 

If the popular media are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to steal your job and threaten life as we know it. If we do not prepare now, we may face a future where AI runs free and dominates humans in society.

The AI revolution is indeed underway. To ensure you are prepared to make it through the times ahead, we’ve created a handy survival guide for you.

Step 1: Recognizing AI

The first step in every conflict is knowing your target. It is crucial to acknowledge that AI is not in the future; it is already here.

Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

 

This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

Facebook-Germany to test “fake news” filter ahead of federal election

In the coming weeks, German users of Facebook will be able to report a story as “fake” to an independent fact-checking organization which may tag it as “disputed,” as a warning to users. The network plans to apply this filtering system in the run-up to Germany’s federal election in September. Facebook is concerned about a new law proposed in Germany to levy a €500,000 ($523,320) fine for every single piece of misinformation published and not removed by the network within 24 hours.

Facebook teams with Soros-funded groups to ‘fake’ check news stories

Facebook, in its effort to “fact-check” its news and ferret out “fake news,” has enlisted an organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros and several other leftists to do the fact-checking.

Facebook announced on Dec. 15 that it will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

IFCN, which is hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, is openly funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Merkel Wants to Fully Censor the Internet Claiming Putin Wants Her Defeated

 

Merkel is already adopting the Obama strategy by blaming Putin for any potential loss in the election. She is going much further, perhaps because she grew up in Eastern Germany and sees no problem grabbing more power. Her party, the CDU , claims that the ambitions of Vladimir Putin are to defeat her in the elections this fall in the Bundestag, ignoring that the CDU has been coming in third place. Angela Merkel now says that disinformation is being sent over the internet to dethrone her. Therefore, the CDU wants full censorship in Germany and is planning to impose incredibly strict rules for all communication on the internet. She is claiming any negative news is really instigated by agents of Russia. That will probably include this site, despite the fact our model is not influenced by any human intervention, no less Putin.

Week in Review: The Iranian Empire Is Back, Europe’s Military, Censoring ‘Fake News,’ and Much More

 

Highlights:

Return of the Iranian Empire

• “For the first time since 625 c.e.,” wrote Hussain Abdul-Hussain for now media, “Iran has restored its control over a contiguous territory that extends from the east of Afghanistan to the Mediterranean coast.”
• The Syrian regime recently announced that Hezbollah will play a lead role in the nation’s military.
• On the other hand, the Iraqi government voted to fully legalize Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias, officially making them a part of the Iraqi government forces.
• Abdul-Hussain continued: “[T]hese militias will control—on Tehran’s behalf—their respective armies and, by extension, the governments behind these armies.”