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Surveillance: NSA Chief Alexander Joins Amazon Board
by grarpamp 10 Sep '20

10 Sep '20

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/9/21429635/amazon-keith-alexander-board-of-… https://sec.report/Document/0001018724-20-000026/ https://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/27/2025200/nsa-chief-keith-alexander-t… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/03/10/2212236/federal-judge-admits-existe… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa#Privacy_concerns Don't forget to say hi to "Alex"a... she's always on, always listening and recording you, always connected to the internet, always closed source... Gen. Keith Alexander is joining Amazon's board of directors, the company revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today. The Verge reports: A former director of the National Security Agency and the first commander of the US Cyber Command, Alexander served as the public face of US data collection during the Edward Snowden leaks, but he retired from public service in 2013. Alexander is a controversial figure for many in the tech community because of his involvement in the widespread surveillance systems revealed by the Snowden leaks. Those systems included PRISM, a broad data collection program that compromised systems at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook -- but not Amazon. Alexander was broadly critical of reporting on the Snowden leaks, even suggesting that reporters should be legally restrained from covering the documents. [...] Alexander's board spot will also give Amazon new expertise in defense contracting, an area of particular focus for the company in recent years.

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Cryptocurrency: CBDC's and Mastercard... Distributed Cryptos are losing the adoption race
by grarpamp 10 Sep '20

10 Sep '20

https://decrypt.co/41328/mastercard-to-help-central-banks-test-their-own-di… https://mastercardcontentexchange.com/newsroom/press-releases/2020/septembe… https://decrypt.co/36394/visa-lays-out-platform-agnostic-approach-crypto-bl… OG Distributed Cryptocurrency Voluntaryists better wake the fuck back up and get off their ass, these sorts of CBDC news have been coming strong the last year or so... OG's you are losing the people's mindthink adoption race... International payments provider Mastercard has launched a virtual testing environment to help central banks around the world test their Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), said an announcement today. >From a report: "Today, Mastercard announced a proprietary virtual testing environment for central banks to evaluate CBDC use cases. The platform enables the simulation of issuance, distribution and exchange of CBDCs between banks, financial service providers and consumers," said the company. According to the announcement, the effort would allow banks to test whether CBDCs fit them and are feasible to be issued -- locally or regionally. "The virtual platform can be individually customized to the environment in which the central bank operates, allowing them to [...] simulate a CBDC issuance, distribution and exchange ecosystem with banks and consumers, including how a CBDC can interface with existing payment networks and infrastructures -- e.g., cards and real time payments," said the announcement. BTW, some SJW in BLM forgot to rename racist "Master"card, lol.

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virtue-signalling Corporations getting cancelled - "We have to play the same game they do" - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 10 Sep '20

10 Sep '20

Patagonia, Ford, Dr Bronners, and AirBNB signal their virtue... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-09-08/patagonia-ford-dr-bronners-and-ai… ... “Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” ― Anna Lappé ...

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Privacy 1984: Predictive Policing on the Rise
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7q55x/police-across-canada-are-using-pr… To Surveil and Predict: A Human Rights Analysis of Algorithmic Policing in Canada is the result of a joint investigation by the University of Toronto’s International Human Rights Program (IHRP) and Citizen Lab. It details how, in the words of the report’s authors, “law enforcement agencies across Canada have started to use, procure, develop, or test a variety of algorithmic policing methods,” with potentially dire consequences for civil liberties, privacy and other Charter rights, the authors warn. ... “Right now, we know far too little about what algorithmic technologies are being deployed and how they’re being used,” Robertson said. “It’s hard for accountability mechanisms to operate if the technology is being used in secret.”

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Privacy: Your Family Has Likely Sold You Out to DNA and Location Harvesters
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/07/1955218/a-private-equity-firm-boug… Save your privacy, Know that you are Human and Future, all other silly things Past are moot. The genealogy company Ancestry has been acquired by investment firm Blackstone for $4.7 billion, changing ownership of the company and its trove of user-submitted DNA from a set of investment firms to another private equity firm. From a report: The announcement was made in a press release published earlier this week by Blackstone, which shared it had "reached a definitive agreement to acquire Ancestry from Silver Lake, GIC, Spectrum Equity, Permira, and other equity holders for a total enterprise value of $4.7 billion." Ancestry is known for its genealogy and home DNA testing services. According to its website, the company has 3 million paying subscribers, 27 billion records, and 100 million family trees. The website also says that over 18 million people have been DNA tested through the company. "To be crystal clear, Blackstone will not have access to user data and we are deeply committed to ensuring strong consumer privacy protections at the company," a spokesperson for Blackstone told Motherboard in an email. "We will not be sharing user DNA and family tree records with our portfolio companies." A spokesperson from Ancestry also said the company's relationship with its users would remain the same. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/09/02/1750221/private-intel-firm-buys-loc… A threat intelligence firm called HYAS, a private company that tries to prevent or investigates hacks against its clients, is buying location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples' phones around the world, and using it to unmask hackers. The company is a business, not a law enforcement agency, and claims to be able to track people to their "doorstep." From a report: The news highlights the complex supply chain and sale of location data, traveling from apps whose users are in some cases unaware that the software is selling their location, through to data brokers, and finally to end clients who use the data itself. The news also shows that while some location firms repeatedly reassure the public that their data is focused on the high level, aggregated, pseudonymous tracking of groups of people, some companies do buy and use location data from a largely unregulated market explicitly for the purpose of identifying specific individuals. HYAS' location data comes from X-Mode, a company that started with an app named "Drunk Mode," designed to prevent college students from making drunk phone calls and has since pivoted to selling user data from a wide swath of apps. Apps that mention X-Mode in their privacy policies include Perfect365, a beauty app, and other innocuous looking apps such as an MP3 file converter. "As a TI [threat intelligence] tool it's incredible, but ethically it stinks," a source in the threat intelligence industry who received a demo of HYAS' product told Motherboard. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/18/0040216/secret-service-paid-to-get-… An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A newly released document shows the U.S. Secret Service went through a controversial social media surveillance company to purchase the location information on American's movements, no warrant necessary. Babel Street is a shadowy organization that offers a product called Locate X that is reportedly used to gather anonymized location data from a host of popular apps that users have unwittingly installed on their phones. When we say "unwittingly," we mean that not everyone is aware that random innocuous apps are often bundling and anonymizing their data to be sold off to the highest bidder. Back in March, Protocol reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had a contract to use Locate X and that sources inside the secretive company described the system's capabilities as allowing a user "to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area, and see where else those devices have traveled, going back months." Protocol's sources also said that the Secret Service had used the Locate X system in the course of investigating a large credit card skimming operation. On Monday, Motherboard confirmed the investigation when it published an internal Secret Service document it acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. (You can view the full document here.) The document covers a relationship between Secret Service and Babel Street from September 28, 2017, to September 27, 2018. In the past, the Secret Service has reportedly used a separate social media surveillance product from Babel Street, and the newly-released document totals fees paid after the addition of the Locate X license as $1,999,394. https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/12/2039220/homeland-security-details-n… Travelers heading to the US have many reasons to be cautious about their devices when it comes to privacy. A report released Thursday from the Department of Homeland Security provides even more cause for concern about how much data border patrol agents can pull from your phones and computers. From a report: In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated July 30, the DHS detailed its US Border Patrol Digital Forensics program, specifically for its development of tools to collect data from electronic devices. For years, DHS and border agents were allowed to search devices without a warrant, until a court found the practice unconstitutional in November 2019. In 2018, the agency searched more than 33,000 devices, compared to 30,200 searches in 2017 and just 4,764 searches in 2015. Civil rights advocates have argued against this kind of surveillance, saying it violates people's privacy rights. The report highlights the DHS' capabilities, and shows that agents can create an exact copy of data on devices when travelers cross the border. According to the DHS, extracted data from devices can include: Contacts, call logs/details, IP addresses used by the device, calendar events, GPS locations used by the device, emails, social media information, cell site information, phone numbers, videos and pictures, account information (user names and aliases), text/chat messages, financial accounts and transactions, location history, browser bookmarks, notes, network information, and tasks list. The policy to retain this data for 75 years still remains, according to the report. Another month full of Privacy Fuckery Against You, month after month after year after year, when you gonna revolt... https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/01/0050234/google-victory-in-german-to… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/02/039242/will-chinas-ai-surveillance-… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/03/0410259/after-5-years-australia-fin… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/04/2115222/twitter-faces-ftc-probe-lik… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/05/1728253/twitter-says-android-securi… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/06/223252/lawmakers-ask-california-dmv… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/07/1650242/us-government-contractor-em… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/09/000209/china-is-now-blocking-all-en… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/11/1659249/zoom-sued-by-consumer-group… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/11/2247254/police-use-of-facial-recogn… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/12/2039220/homeland-security-details-n… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/15/0118251/san-diegos-police-are-using… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/17/2129202/an-alexa-bug-could-have-exp… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/18/0040216/secret-service-paid-to-get-… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/18/1955209/landlord-tech-watch-site-le… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/19/212230/235-million-instagram-tiktok… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/20/1420227/fearing-coronavirus-a-michi… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/21/2151223/microsoft-plans-cloud-contr… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/21/2331235/palantir-techs-next-big-ipo… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/23/016244/police-in-several-us-cities-… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/24/145218/people-in-the-developing-wor… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/24/2228219/bridgefy-the-messenger-prom… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/26/2345205/clearview-ai-ceo-says-over-… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/27/1918250/amazon-announces-halo-a-fit… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/28/1954206/ftc-probes-huge-financial-d… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/29/0412247/your-browsing-history-can-u… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/08/31/2151231/fbi-worried-ring-and-other-… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/09/02/1750221/private-intel-firm-buys-loc… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/09/02/1915216/court-rules-nsa-phone-snoop… https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/09/02/1942251/cbp-does-not-make-it-clear-…

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Cryptocurrency: Richard Stallman on Taler and Bitcoin
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

https://cointelegraph.com/news/richard-stallman-a-discussion-on-freedom-pri… https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/08/10/0032203/richard-stallman-discusses… https://stallman.org/glossary.html Richard Stallman gave a new interview to the site Cointelegraph, which asked him his feelings about cryptocurrencies. "I'm not against them," Stallman answers "I'm not campaigning to eliminate them, I just don't particularly want to use them." Cointelegraph then asks Stallman how he feels about tests underway for the Chinese government's own central bank digital currency: Richard Stallman: "Digital payment systems are fundamentally dangerous if they are not engineered to ensure privacy. China is the enemy of privacy. China shows what totalitarian surveillance is like. I consider that hell on earth. That's part of why I haven't used cryptocurrencies that are issued by the community. If the cryptocurrency is issued by a government, it would surveille people just the way credit cards do and PayPal does, and all those other systems meaning completely unacceptable." Stallman later says "I don't do any kind of digital payments, and the reason is the systems that exist do not respect the user's privacy, and that includes Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin transaction is published." But when Cointelegraph asks about various Bitcoin modifications designed for privacy, Stallman answers "I am not convinced about them." Richard Stallman: In any case, the GNU project has developed something much better, which is GNU Taler. GNU Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It is not a currency at all. It is a payment system designed to be used for anonymous payments to businesses to buy something. It is anonymous through a blind signature for the payer. However, the payee has to identify itself for every purchase in order to get money out of the system. So the idea is you can use your bank account to get Taler Tokens, and you can spend them and the payee won't be able to tell who you are. It won't be able to tell that you got the token from a particular bank account at a particular time, even though you did so. To convert your payment into money in its own bank, the store (the payee) will have to identify itself. So this gives privacy in a much more reliable way than cryptocurrencies do, and it blocks the idea of using this system to enable tax evasion. GNU Taler recently had an exciting milestone. A few months ago the eurozone banking system became interested in supporting Taler payments, and just recently they succeeded using a test setup in obtaining Taler tokens with one bank account and paying them to another bank account through the Taler system. Now, it's not something that anybody can use but it will be, and that will be really exciting. And in response to a question about Facebook's "Libra" digital currency project, Stallman says he hasn't study the details "because the most important thing about it I already know. It's connected with Facebook, and Facebook means surveillance. "I urge people to join me in absolutely refusing to use Facebook or rather be used by Facebook. Because Facebook doesn't have users. Facebook has used. So don't be a sucker, don't be used by Facebook."

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Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin vs Gold with Swann vs Schiff
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OML5bcb5aHg Bitcoin vs Gold with Swann vs Schiff More heads talking ~= more adoption.

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Cryptocurrency: Nextgen Smaller Nuclear Power Plants Coming Online Worldwide
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

Sovereign countries spooling up green power for crypto mining ;) Solar is cheap for home mining now too. China Puts Finishing Touches On First "New Generation" Nuclear Power Plant 9/8/2020 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-gives-operating-license-first-00162634… https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-puts-finishing-touches-first-n… https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bill-gates-next-project-building-nuc… Bill Gates better hurry up and build those "homegrown" nuclear reactors across the Pacific Northwest, because China is already on track to outpace the US in applying the newest generation of nuclear power technology to its respective power grid. Bloomberg reported Monday that the country took a significant step forward as its Hualong One reactor began loading fuel for the first time. China National Nuclear Power company, a unit of China National Nuclear, the country's state-controlled nuclear authority, said Monday that fuel loading started at the Fuqing No. 5 reactor, the first to use the new technology, on Sept. 4. The company recently secured an operating license from the Ministry of Ecology & Environment. It's nclear when the reactor might restart. As Bloomberg explains, China is on track to develop the new nuclear technology without any help from the US, and Beijing has abruptly ended a three-year freeze to move this $10 billion project to build more of these reactors across China. Hualong One development is being closely watched in the battle for the nation’s next-generation nuclear power systems. Its success could mean a nuclear revival in China that would have little to do with western developers including Westinghouse Electric Co. from the U.S. and France’s Electricite de France SA. China had almost 49 gigawatts of nuclear power installed as of 2019 and should get into the mid-fifties this year. GlobalData Plc predicts it will pass France as the world’s No. 2 nuclear generator in 2022 and claim the top spot from the U.S. four years after that. Beijing gave the green light to four Hualong One reactors last year in a clear sign of support, ending a three-year freeze on new approvals caused by the government’s consideration of different technologies and the ongoing trade dispute with the U.S. Two more projects that will use Hualong One designs, with a combined cost of $10 billion, were approved last week. The country started up the world’s first next-generation reactors in 2018, including four AP1000 units designed by Westinghouse as well as a project using EDF’s EPR technology. Bill Gates is going to need to step on it if he hopes to keep the US power grid one step ahead of China while helping to make "fossil fuels extinct" at the same time by positioning nuclear power as a 'supplement' to renewables. Gates has predicted that by mid-century we will see "hundreds of these reactors all aroumd the world).

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Whitney: Is BLM The Mask Behind Which The Oligarchs Operate?
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

Authored by Mike Whitney, Here’s your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning tell us about what’s going on in America today? 1. They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people 2. They suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws 3. They alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race war 4. They indicate that powerful agents — operating from within the state– are inciting racial violence to crush the emerging “populist” majority that elected Trump to office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into a tyrannical third-world “shithole”. Which of these four statements best explains what’s going on in America today? If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning are as much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of “ideology”, and all three are being used to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as “Americans”. The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history, their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative “Reset” that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect the strategy will ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging and unapologetic. Let’s look more carefully at what is going on. On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that “White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States”. According to an article in Politico: “…all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups…. John Cohen, who oversaw DHS’s counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts’ conclusion isn’t surprising. “This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes,” he said…. “Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social, ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States,” the draft reads. “Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists …will pose the most persistent and lethal threat.”..(“[42]DHS draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat” Politico) This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined. So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they chosen to prioritize white supremacists as “the most persistent and lethal threat” when it is clearly not true? There’s only one answer: Politics. The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are invoking the race card (“white supremacists”) to divert attention from their sinister destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class “America First” nationalists who handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That’s what’s really going on. DHS’s announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was abolished more than 150 years ago. The 1619 Project” is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the American people. The objective of the “Project” is to convince readers that America was founded by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the World Socialist Web Site: “The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development….Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes….where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions... ...No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.” [43]- “The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, World Socialist Web Site Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution. The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of “social justice.” As Hannah-Jones says, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”, which is to say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution. All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to replace America’s Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones treatise does nothing to improve conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla. Then there is “Critical Race Theory” which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate workers. White employees are being subjected to “reeducation” programs that require their participation as a precondition for further employment . The first rebellion against critical race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs America’s nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo: “Senator [44]@HawleyMO and [45]@SecBrouillette have launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated their purge against conservatives.” Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory, race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees—and all dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative employees will be purged.” (“[46]There is a civil war erupting at [47](a)SandiaLabs.xn--ivg Christopher F Rufo) It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here’s more info on how this toxic indoctrination program works: “Treasury Department … The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” and demanding that white staff members “struggle to own their racism” and accept their “unconscious bias, White privilege, and White fragility.” The National Credit Union Administration The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the blacks of people who were enslaved.” Twitter thread [48]here and original source documents [49]here. Sandia National Laboratories Last year, Sandia National Labs—which produces our nuclear arsenal—held a three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their “white male culture” and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of color. Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now endangering our national security. Twitter thread [50]hereand original source documents [51]here. Argonne National Laboratories Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they “benefit from racism” and atone for the “pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people.” Twitter thread [52]here. Department of Homeland Security The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on “microaggressions, microinequities, and microassaults” where white employees were told that they had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” Twitter thread [53]here and original source documents [54]here.” (“[55]Summary of Critical Race Theory Investigations”, Christopher F Rufo) On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration “would prohibit federal agencies from subjecting government employees to “critical race theory” or “white privilege” seminar... “It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” [56]read a Friday memo from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. “These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce … The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.” The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see whether the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project was being used in school curricula and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding. Conservative pundits applauded Trump’s action as a step forward in the “culture wars”, but it’s really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who continue look for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. Alot of thought and effort went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That’s no small achievement. Bottom line: “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The “anti-white” dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a “racial” smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class “populist” movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies. This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated. 42. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-terror-threat-d… 43. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html 44. https://twitter.com/HawleyMO 45. https://twitter.com/SecBrouillette 46. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1299008750729097216.html 47. https://twitter.com/SandiaLabs 48. https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1285327502861189120 49. https://christopherrufo.com/national-credit-union-administrations-training-… 50. https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1293603172842221570 51. https://christopherrufo.com/national-nuclear-laboratory-training-on-white-p… 52. https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1296470618259456003 53. https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1290410612867047424 54. https://christopherrufo.com/department-of-homeland-security-training-on-mic… 55. https://christopherrufo.com/summary-of-critical-race-theory-investigations/ 56. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/M-20-34.pdf

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MKULTRA and The CIA's War On The Human Mind
by grarpamp 09 Sep '20

09 Sep '20

https://mises.org/wire/mkultra-and-cias-war-human-mind https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Chaos-Deserters-Brainwashers-Themselves/dp… Authored by Jason Morgan via The Mises Institute, [Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)] The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,” regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including against Americans, even inside the United States. But “fearsome” does not mean “flawless.” The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as “Clowns In Action.” Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief, is any indication, the answer is both. A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret, long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind. “History’s most systematic search for techniques of mind control,” Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II. At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin - “America’s first bio-warrior” and a part-time Quaker preacher - was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin’s bigger projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19). For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy. Kinzer’s book tells the tale of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich. The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA—formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice. The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects, or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow. For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis’ director of biowarfare research and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler, was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work - as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US - at Camp Detrick (pp. 20–24). It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin’s at Wisconsin, is the main figure in Kinzer’s book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA. Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA’s laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons—often using unwitting American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper “specially equipped with large aerosol hoses” spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog, infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37–38)—to drugs which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA’s sister CIA project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome’s nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors, America’s “poisoner in chief.” The CIA’s mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47) At first, the Bluebird team experimented with “hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation,” along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA sites in “secret prisons in Germany and Japan,” looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48–49). But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird’s updated iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51–52). The goal of Artichoke was to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind. Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation. If the US didn’t win the race to the mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets. Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year “Artichoke” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov, “had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world” (pp. 52–53). Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever, despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA (p. 59). Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects, Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug’s effects. Washington learned of Hofmann’s discovery in 1949, and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance (pp. 34–35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson, who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60–61). Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche, and therefore to beat the Soviets at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at least, was) the Soviets’ own game. The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb’s conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports that in 1951 a team of CIA scientists led by Dr. Gottlieb flew to Tokyo….Four Japanese suspected of working for the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants and stimulants….Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. (p. 64) The CIA carried out similar experimentation and executions in Korea and Germany (p. 64). Gottlieb was usually personally involved. Throughout the 1950s the experimentation continued. An American artist named Stanley Glickman was lured to a bar near his studio in Paris by CIA agents in 1951 and a chemical was slipped into his drink. Glickman began to hallucinate wildly. He fled in a state of panic and remained in his Paris apartment for the next ten months in paranoid hiding until his family came to take him home, and then he spent the rest of his life as a near invalid. The chemical which the CIA had slipped into Glickman’s drink was almost certainly LSD, and Glickman, Kinzer suggests, had been chosen by the CIA because he had just recovered from hepatitis and the Artichoke team was conducting an experiment on the effects of hepatic infection on the efficacy of LSD (pp. 66–67) Things got worse from there. In 1952, the CIA commissioned underworld denizen and former vice cop George Hunter White to run a human-subjects experiment site at 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York (pp. 74–75). White’s job was to bring to the CIA’s apartment “expendables” on whom Gottlieb and his team could test LSD. White “knew the whores, the pimps, the people who brought in the drugs,” as one of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA colleagues later explained, and this made him invaluable for procuring the “drug users, petty criminals, and others who could be relied upon not to complain about what had happened to them” when the CIA’s experiments were finished (pp. 76–77). Many of these “expendables” suffered nervous breakdowns, and some died. In order to keep the supply of LSD flowing, CIA agents went to Basel, where LSD had been discovered, and tried to buy all the LSD in stock. Allen Dulles authorized a $240,000 outlay to pay for it (p. 86). Sandoz held the patent for Hofmann’s 1943 discovery, but Sandoz wanted nothing to do with the troublesome substance and so Gottlieb, freed of any need to scruple over IP infringement, tasked US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly with making LSD in the States (pp. 85–86) With their mind control serum in production, MKULTRA agents could focus on how to dose experimental subjects. The CIA even hired a professional magician, John Mulholland, to teach Gottlieb and his agents how to deliver LSD into unsuspecting subjects’ drinks and food without being detected (pp. 89–94) Gottlieb recruited a Kentucky addiction specialist, Dr. Harry Isbell, to test LSD and new mind-altering drugs on prisoners and patients. More lives were destroyed (pp. 94–96). Among the victims of another of Gottlieb’s agent-doctors was none other than James “Whitey” Bulger, the mafioso who, along with “nineteen other inmates” at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, beginning in 1957 “was given LSD nearly every day for fifteen months, without being told what it was” (pp. 98–99). Bulger was plagued for the rest of his life with nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and “deep depression” (p. 98). Bulger, who had been told that he was taking part in experiments designed to find a cure for schizophrenia, did not learn the truth about what had happened until 1979 (pp. 263–64). The human toll of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA experiments continued to mount. One of Gottlieb’s closest associates in the project, Frank Olson—a bacteriologist trained at the University of Wisconsin who had also been recruited for the CIA by Gottlieb’s mentor Ira Baldwin—began to express doubts about what the MKULTRA team was doing. He told his wife that he had made a “terrible mistake” in his work (p. 114). He shared his misgivings with his CIA colleagues as well. Olson’s conscience appeared to be getting the better of him, and he became a liability to the team. In late 1953, Gottlieb surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD at a backwoods MKULTRA gathering, “Deep Creek Rendezvous,” outside Camp Detrick (p. 113). Olson spiraled into a frightening disorientation, and early in the morning on November 28, 1953—a few days after Thanksgiving—Olson “fell or jumped” from a window of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, dying few moments after hitting the concrete below. Another MKULTRA agent, Gottlieb’s lieutenant Robert Lashbrook, was the only other person in the room when Olson “fell or jumped” (pp. 120–21). Lashbrook told the New York City police that Olson had jumped out of the window and Olson’s death was originally designated a suicide, but the Olson family eventually grew suspicious and an investigation was carried out, including a new autopsy on Olson’s body. The forensic pathologist, after a month’s examination of the corpse, declared: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window” (p. 250). Wounds on Olson’s body were consistent with methods taught in CIA manuals for incapacitating people and then killing them in order to make their deaths look self-inflicted. Gottlieb and MKULTRA were shaken by Olson’s demise, but they carried on with their work. They spent the next few years looking for magic mushrooms in Mexico (157); arranging suicide capsules for American agents, including U-2 pilot Gary Powers (who chose not to use his when he was shot down over the Soviet Union) (pp. 172–75); attempting, at the order of then attorney general Robert Kennedy, to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (after exploding cigars and exploding conch shells were ruled out, Gottlieb tried with a wetsuit laced with fungi and bacteria) (p. 184); and hooking Allen Ginsberg and other radicals on LSD (pp. 188–90). Gottlieb personally delivered to the American embassy in Leopoldville in the Congo poisons that Gottlieb had developed to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, but the Belgians and the Africans beat the CIA to it (pp. 176–80). Gottlieb’s career brought ruin and suffering to untold numbers of people, many of them innocent. He retired from the CIA in 1973 after receiving the Distinguished Intelligence Medal (p. 211). Lifelong devotees of folk dance, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, moved to the countryside in rural Virginia and attempted to blend in with the small community there, volunteering, dancing, and experimenting with radical ecology. However, “investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam,” learned of the MH-CHAOS program targeting Americans, and the Congress was forced to act. Gottlieb’s career, long a well-kept secret, was being brought into the open, and his retirement would therefore be far from peaceful. But there were still many who tried to cover up what Gottlieb and the other MKULTRA agents had done. In 1975, after the outcry caused by the Hersh reporting, President Gerald Ford deputized Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission on the CIA. The new CIA director, William Colby, was remarkably frank. Colby informed the Rockefeller Commission that “the CIA had conducted LSD experiments that resulted in deaths. Later he referred to assassination plots” (p. 216). Nelson Rockefeller, attempting to prevent the CIA director from revealing too much, buttonholed Colby later: “Bill, do you really have to present all this material to us?” (p. 216). In 1977, in the wake of the Church Report on further American intelligence excesses, Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert’s brother, spurred on by some documents which had been discovered as the result of a FOIA request (Gottlieb had ordered all MKULTRA files burned, but some undetected copies remained), called Admiral Stansfield Turner to testify before Congress on MKULTRA. The walls were closing in. Gottlieb himself was eventually forced to testify—albeit in a closed-room setting his lawyer had helped arrange—but Gottlieb essentially pleaded amnesia (nearly all of his answers to questions about MKULTRA were some version of “I do not recall”) and the matter seemed to end there. Still, the skeletons in Gottlieb’s closet would not go away. In 1984 Gottlieb agreed to meet with the family of Frank Olson, the former MKULTRA colleague who had “fallen or jumped” from his Manhattan hotel room in 1953. Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, was unconvinced by Gottlieb’s explanation for the “accident,” and, after Frank Olson’s widow and Eric’s mother passed away, ordered Frank’s body exhumed in 1994. As information about MKULTRA built in the public’s awareness, other cases were reopened, including that of Stanley Glickman. (257) The courts were now involved and Gottlieb could not count on the CIA to get him out of his legal trouble. Gottlieb pushed back the trial for Glickman’s murder as long as he could, and then, in early March, 1999, Sidney Gottlieb died. Like Frank Olson, it was not officially revealed whether or not the death had been a suicide (p. 259). Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America’s most unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “the Agency” has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a sobering revelation. Sidney Gottlieb, the person directly responsible for much, if not most, of the MKULTRA devastation over more than twenty years, remains as mysterious at the end of Kinzer’s volume as at the beginning, however. By all accounts Gottlieb was a good student from a stable family. Kinzer speculates that perhaps Gottlieb’s having been rejected for military service in World War II—Gottlieb stuttered and had a clubfoot—left him unsatisfied and impatient to prove his patriotism, an urgent task for the son of immigrant Jews (p. 50). Gottlieb was heavily involved in New Age mysticism and meditation and appears to have expended considerable energy psychologically compartmentalizing his “work,” so there are indications that he was aware that the experiments he and his MKULTRA team were carrying out were, at best, unethical, and objectively speaking often outright crimes. But Gottlieb was hardly alone in his endeavors, and the explanation that Gottlieb, Allen Dulles, and many others in the CIA gave—to themselves and to each other, and to the world around when pressed—makes the most sense. They had a country to defend, they faced an enemy of unprecedented cruelty in the Soviet Union, and they were willing to do whatever it took, even sacrificing innocent people, to keep Americans as a whole from falling under the spell of communist mind control.

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