John R. Houk, Blog Editor
© March 10, 2022
Here’s a title that should pique the interest of every
Liberty-loving American (and those seeking Freedom in the one-time Free Western
World): “How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military
Origins of the Internet.” The title comes originally from a website
called The Cogent
which evidently is operated by Dustin Broadbery. At The Cogent the title comes
in two parts posted on the same day (3/4/22).
I first discovered the title of Part
One posting at the Activist
Post dated 3/7/22. Then I found the Part
Two posting at the NWO Report
on 3/9/22.
Both the Activist Post and the NWO Report use
the same image attention hook which I will use at the top of this page. In
cross posting I will us The Cogent image hook of the original.
I suspect I’m behind the old 8-ball because I have no idea
who Dustin Broadbery is. In a not to thorough search,
I could only find profile info at Muck Rack which reads:
Dustin Broadbery
Ø
Freelance Writer, Freelance
Ø
London
Ø
Media, Politics, Technology
Ø
As seen in: Activist Post, The
Conservative Woman
Ø
Covers: Geopolitics,
biosecurity, activism, technology and philanthropy
The globalised takeover of our
commons is being orchestrated by a handful of elites so small in number you
could fit them into one prison cell thecogent.org
Muck Rack then links to a few Broadbery articles and
throws in his Twitter feed. My guess is Broadbery is of British origin because
the spelling and grammar in the posts are traditional British usage.
Now to the cross posts.
Part One is a fantastic history of the emergence of
the Internet developed initially as a psyop tool by the military which someone
stumbled upon the concept of controlling people via social monitoring.
Part Two goes through the history of social
engineering psyops to initially infiltrate Leftist (think Communist) operations
through today to infiltrate ordinary citizen thinking that might be an enemy of
government-think. For example: If you are a Bill of Rights, Flag-Waving Patriot
and believer of the Christian influence in America’s Heritage; YOU MIGHT BE a
domestic terrorist. WHY? Because you’d be contrary to the current
government-think.
I am cross posting both parts which are quite lengthy. So,
you might want to bookmark it to read as you have time. I believe you will be
surprised at what you know and don’t know. In the lifespan that remains for me,
trusting my government is not an option.
JRH 3/10/22
I need your generosity. PLEASE GIVE to overcome research expenses:
Big Tech Censorship is pervasive – Share voluminously on
all social media platforms!
********************************
How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the
Military Origins of the Internet, Part 1
By Dustin Broadbery
Updated: 3/5/22
Part 1: Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth
As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties,
research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the
usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed
“birds of a feather” formations. That's when flocks of sparrows make sudden
movements together in rhythmical patterns.
They were particularly interested in how these principles
would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the
burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way
as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And
if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified
later by their digital fingerprints?
To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a
series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly
fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program.
Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose
in the spring of 1995.
Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to
capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital
library and indexing system - using the internet as its backbone - were
dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making
significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that
would track user movements online.
Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a
multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google
Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global
eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information
awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley
is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had
on the social sphere. But the story does not begin with Google, nor the
military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the
dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.
The Dawn of PSYOPs
According to historian Joy Rhodes, a renowned physicist told U.S. defence
secretary Robert McNamara in 1961:
“While World War I might have
been considered the chemists’ war, and World War II was considered the
physicists’ war, World War III . . . might well have to be considered the
social scientists’ war.”
The intersection of social science and military intelligence
is recognised by the US Army to have begun during WW1 when pre-war journalist
Captain Blankenhorn established the Psychological Subsection in the War
Department to coordinate combat propaganda.
These grey-area operations, as they become known, plateaued
during world war II, when military strategists, building on wartime research in
crowd psychology, drafted social scientists into
the war effort through the Office of Scientific Research and Development
(OSRD). The office would aggregate information about the German people and
develop propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOPS) to lower their morale.
This culminated in 1942, with the US federal government becoming the leading
employer of psychologists in the US.
OSRD was an early administration of the Manhattan Project
and responsible for important wartime developments in technology, including
radar.
As the second world war ended, and a new threat emerged from
post war ravaged Europe, scholars and soldiers once again reunited to defeat an
invisible and aggressively expansionist adversary. Though this opponent may
sound like COVID-19, it was in fact the Soviet Union.
Across the Soviet satellites in Europe and in the nations
threatened by communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cold war special
operations, as they become known, were a nebulous category of military activity
that included psychological and political warfare, guerrilla operations and
counterinsurgency. To mobilise these ‘special warfare tactics’ the army
established the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW) in 1951,
whose mission was to recruit, organise, equip, train, and provide doctrinal support
to Psywarriors.
The office was directed by General Robert McClure, a
founding father of psychological warfare and friend of the Shah of Iran, who
was instrumental in the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1953 Iranian
coup d’état.
Integral to the projects of McClure’s OCPW, was a
quasi-academic institution with a long history of military service called the Human
Relations Area Files (HRAF). Founded by anthropologist turned FBI
whistle-blower George Murdock, HRAF was set up to collect and standardise data
on primitive cultures around the world. During WW2 its researchers worked hand
in glove with naval intelligence to develop propaganda materials that would
help the US liberate pacific nations from Japanese control. By 1954, the
department had grown into an inter-university consortium of 16 academic
institutions, funded by the army, CIA, and private philanthropies.
In 1954 the OCPW negotiated a contract with the HRAF to
author a series of special warfare handbooks, disguised as scholarship, that
sought to understand the intellectual and emotional character of strategically
important people, particularly their thoughts, motivations and actions, with
entire chapters compiled on the attitudes and subversive potentials of foreign
nationals, while other chapters focused on the means of transmitting propaganda
in each target nation, whether news, radio or word of mouth. This was, of
course, decades before the internet.
SORO
In 1956, the Special Operations Research Office (SORO)
emerged from these programs. Charged with managing the US Army’s psychological
and unconventional warfare tactics during the cold war and taking the work of
HRAF to the next level, SORO set about the monumental task of defining the
political and social causes of Communist revolution, the laws governing social
change and the theories of communication and persuasion that could be used to
transform public perception.
SORO formed a central component of the Pentagons
militarisation of social research, and particularly the ideas and doctrine that
would usher in a gradual shift towards an American-led world order. Its
research team was located on the campus of American University in Washington,
D.C, and comprised the era’s pre-eminent intellectuals and academics. SORO’s
ensemble team, from the fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology, would
immerse themselves in social system theory, analysing the society and culture
of numerous target countries, particularly in Latin
America, while confronting the universal laws governing social
behaviour and the mechanisms of communication and persuasion in each
jurisdiction. If the US Army could understand the psychological factors that
sparked revolution, they could, in theory, predict and intercept revolutions
before they got off the ground.
SORO was part of a rapidly expanding nexus of federally
Funded Research Centres (FCRC’s), that reoriented academia towards national
security interests. Working at the intersection of science and the state,
SORON’s, as they were known, advocated for an expert-directed democracy,
regardless of the totalitarian consequences of social engineers and technocrats
acquiring control over the thoughts, actions, and values of ordinary people.
In those early days of the cold war, academics and
scientists working at the intersection of military and academia firmly believed
that intellectuals should guide geopolitics. This was accepted as the most
stable form of governance to take the free world into the next century. It
explains how we have arrived under the rubric of the ‘settled science’ today.
Or at least, policies masquerading as science. From the biosecurity state to
the fundamentalism of climate science, much of what was achieved in those
golden years of militarised social research shapes the twenty first century.
By 1962, sixty-six federally funded military research
institutions were in operation. Between 1951 to 1967, the number tripled, while
funding skyrocketed from $122 million to $1.6 billion.
But as opposition to the Vietnam War intensified in the
1960s, a growing number of intellectuals, policymakers and academics became
increasingly concerned that the national security state was morphing into the
statist, globalist force it had been fighting during the cold war and began
publicly criticising Pentagon-funded social scientists as technocratic social
engineers. This inspired a wave of discontent for the militarisation of social
research to grip America, culminating in 1969 with American University’s
administrators banishing SORO from their campus and severing ties with their
military partners. The move was endemic of the changing attitude towards these
grey area special operations and resulted in the 1960’s and 1970’s with the
excommunication of military research centres from university campuses across
the US. A move that forced the military to look elsewhere - towards the private
sector for their alternative warfare capabilities. Following a long tradition
of public-private military cooperation, from the Rand Corporation to the
Smithsonian Group, these quasi-private institutions were being spun-out of the
military at a rate of knots since the 1940’s.
Project Camelot
One of the programs conceived by SORO was ‘Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential. Codenamed Project Camelot, the landmark program sought to understand the causes of social revolution and identify actions, within the realm of behavioural science, that could be taken to suppress insurrection. The goal, according to defence analyst, Joy Rhodes, was 'to build a radar system for left wing revolutionaries.' A sort of ‘computerised early warning system that could predict and prevent political movements before they ever got off the ground.’
‘This computer system’ writes Joy Rhodes, ‘could check up to
date intelligence against a list of preconditions, and revolutions could be
stopped before the instigators even knew they were headed down the path of
revolution.’
The research collected by Project Camelot would produce
predictive models of the revolutionary process and profile what social
scientists deemed ‘revolutionary tendencies and traits.’ It was anticipated
that such knowledge would not only help military leaders anticipate the
trajectory of social change, but it would also enable them to design effective
interventions that could, in theory, channel or suppress change in ways that
were favourable to U.S. foreign policy interests.
It was intended that the information gathered by Project
Camelot would funnel into a large ‘computerised database’ for forecasting,
social engineering, and counterinsurgency, that could be tapped at any time by
the military and intelligence community.
But the project was beleaguered by controversy when
academics in South America discovered its military funding and imperialism
motives.
The ensuing backlash resulted in Project Camelot being,
ostensibly, shut down, though the core of its project survived. Multiple
military research projects picked up on Project Camelot’s ‘early warning radar
system for left wing revolutionaries,’ while its computerised database for
‘forecasting, social engineering, and counterinsurgency’ went onto inspire a
nascent technology developed in the years to come, that would eventually become
known to the world as the internet.
The Military Origins of the Internet
At the height of the Cold War,
US military commanders were pursuing a decentralised computer communications
system without a base of operations or headquarters, that could withstand a
Soviet strike, without blacking-out or destroying the entire network.
The project was coordinated by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), created by President Eisenhower in 1958, for the
development of technologies that would expand the frontiers of science and
technology and help the US close the missile gap with the Soviets.
DARPA has since been at the vanguard of every major
advancement in the development of personal computers ever since the cold war,
culminating in 1969 with the first computers being in universities across the
US.
A few years later DARPA would develop the protocols to
enable connected computers to communicate transparently across multiple
networks. Known as The Internetting Project, DARPA’s prototypical
communications network, the ARPANET, was born in 1973.
The project was eventually transferred to the Defence
Communications Agency and integrated into the numerous new networks that had
emerged. By 1983 the ARPANET was divided into two constituents: MILNET to be
used by military and defence agencies, while the civilian version would retain
the ARPANET handle.
Fast forward to 1990 and the ARPANET was officially
decommissioned, and the Internet privatised to a consortium of corporations
including IBM and MCI. Eventually the federal government created a dozen or so
network providers and spun them off to the private sector, building companies
that would become the backbone of today's internet, including Verizon
Time-Warner, AT&T and Comcast. That’s the same six corporations who not only own 90% of US media
outlets, they control the flow of global communications, through a process of
absolute vertical-horizontal alignment of legacy media with
digital media, and the infrastructures and technologies that enable their mass
communication, including cable, satellite and wireless, the devices and
hardware, software and operating systems
J.C.R. Licklider
A central player in the development of the ARPANET, who many
consider the founding father of computing, was American psychologist, J. C. R.
Licklider.
Lick, as he was known, was the first Director of the agency
tasked with executing DARPA's information technology programs, The Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), that has been responsible for just about
major advancement in computer communications since the sixties.
As Stephen J. Lukasik, a contributor to the ARPANET project
reflected in his paper ' ‘Why the Arpanet Was Built’ ‘Lick saw information
technology and behavioural and cognitive science issues as connected.’
‘Lick was essentially predicting how the internet would go
on to evoke real world social processes that would radically transform how we
communicate, organise and process information. It is no coincidence that a
psychologist of ‘Licks calibre was at the vanguard of a new technology designed
to exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.
In the 1960’s Lick oversaw DARPA’s strategic interest in the
new frontier of information technology, called Brain Computer Interfaces
(BCI’s). In his famous paper, considered one of the most important
in the history of computing, Lick put forward the then radical idea that the human mind
would one day merge seamlessly with computers. He was anticipating
the evolution of AI and the role that DARPA would go on to play in funding just
about every major advancement in BCI technology over eight decades, including
Elon Musk’s fully-implanted,
wireless, brain-machine interface company, Neuralink.
The Vietnam War
The ARPANET brought together the Pentagon’s war machine with
university research departments and the Bay area’s counterculture scene.
Inspiring much of the anecdotal idealism that would define the early years of
cyberspace as a liberating new frontier for humanity. Cyberspace, it was lauded
by its early adopters, would free information and provide universal connectivity.
The realms of possibility were, indeed, endless.
But war hawks and intelligence analysts had other ideas. If
the lessons of the Vietnam war were anything to go by, the future of US warfare
would not be with nation states, it would be with ideologies, or more
specifically, grassroots movements, such as the Viet Cong, who had the power to
stoke the flames of civil unrest, that could lead to uprisings, or worse,
revolution. Alternative approaches were, therefore, needed to infiltrate and
disrupt this new threat to the free world.
As the war raged in Southeast Asia, another psychology PHD,
Robert Taylor, joined DARPA as the agency's third director. Taylor transferred
to Vietnam in 1967, to establish the first computer centre at the Military Assistance Command base in Saigon,
a central pillar in the DoD’s psychological warfare operations. The move was
endemic of the changing rules of military engagement that saw DARPA, and
indeed, this new technology, playing a major role in the war effort, both in
Southeast Asia, and at home on US soil, against the growing anti-war movement.
In 1968, Taylor and ‘Lick published their seminal paper
"The Computer as a Communication Device." Laying out the future of
what the Internet would eventually become. The paper began with the visionary
statement: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more
effectively through a machine than face to face.” Anticipating the meteoric
rise of social media, particularly Facebook, in the decades to come.
Bringing the PSYOP Back Home
The origins of Facebook coincide with a controversial military
program that was mysteriously shut down the same year Facebook launched.
The military program in question, LifeLog, was developed by
DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, with the
stated aim of creating a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a
person’s entire life - a dataset of their most personal information, including their movements, conversations, connections, and everything
they listened to, watched, read and bought.
But would people willingly give up a record of their private
lives to a military intelligence social media platform?
Probably not. Enter Facebook.
LifeLog, meanwhile, was ostensibly shut down, but this was
not the first nor the last time that a project of this magnitude would be
proposed.
In a 1945 article for The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush who, the
reader will recall, directed the US Army's psychological operations during World
War II, discussed his hypothetical project, The Memex, as a device “in which an
individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is
mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and
flexibility."
In immortalising people's lives, it was hoped that LifeLog
would eventually contribute to the emerging field of artificial intelligence
(AI), that would one day think just like a human, intersecting with another
DARPA backed project - the Personal Assistant That Learns (PAL) - a cognitive
computing system designed to make military decision-making more efficient,
which was eventually spun-off as Siri, the virtual assistant on Apple's
operating system, present in the homes of 1 billion unsuspecting people.
But LifeLog is just one part of the story. There was another
DARPA program that also ‘disappeared’ one year before Facebook made its debut.
Often cited as the precursor to Facebook. The Information Awareness Office
(IAO) brought together several DARPA surveillance and information technology
projects including MDDS which provided Google's seed funding.
The stated aim of the IAO was to gather and store the
personal information of every US citizen, including their personal emails,
social networks, lifestyles, credit card records, phone calls, medical records,
without, of course, the need for a search warrant. This information would
funnel back to intelligence agencies, under the guise of predicting and
preventing terrorist incidents before they happened. Reminiscent of Project
Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries.
Despite the government, apparently, abandoning their gambit
for total information awareness over ordinary Americans, the core of the
project survived.
I draw your attention to Palantir, the spooky data analytics
firm founded by Facebook’s board member, Peter Thiel.
Portrayed as science fiction in the firm Minority Report,
Palantir’s predictive policing analytics have been deployed extensively against
insurgents in Iraq and by police departments in the US.
This is, of course, nothing new for the Chinese. The
convergence of big tech data analytics with China's social credits system has
been used for many years to weed out and punish dissidents who can find
themselves held indefinitely without charge or trial in political re-education
camps for holding the wrong set of political beliefs.
But it must also be accepted, these Orwellian methods of
repression did not originate in China. The encroachment of the CIA onto the
public sphere has been happening since the 1960’s, when the US imported decades
of counterinsurgency from the soviet satellites to tackle the anti-war and civil
rights movements. This was ramped up in the wake of 9/11. And now through the
backdoor of COVID-19 total information awareness is coming home to roost, as
China’s social credits system has been implemented on the back of the Green
Pass.
Before anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, you had civil
rights and anti-war activists. The ideology guiding dissent may have changed,
but the military tactics used to counter it remain the same.
++++++++++++++++++++++
How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the
Military Origins of the Internet, Part 2
By Dustin Broadbery
3/4/22
Part 2: The War is Over, The Good Guys Lost
If insurgency is defined as an organised political struggle
by a hostile minority, attempting to seize power through revolutionary means,
then counterinsurgency is the military doctrine historically used against
non-state actors, that sets out to infiltrate and eradicate those movements.
Unlike conventional soldiers, insurgents are considered
dangerous, not because of their physical presence on the battlefield, but
because of their ideology.
As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in
counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:
“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an
active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority
against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable
minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate
the hostile minority.”
Overtime, however, the intelligence state lost touch with
reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to
domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens.
Particularly in the wake of 9/11, when the NSA and its British counterpart,
GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know
that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including
the cell phone records, emails, web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans.
There’s another name for this, and its total information
awareness. The highest attainment of a paranoid state seeking absolute control
over its population. What ceases to be worth the candle is that peoples right
to privacy is enshrined under the US Constitution's fourth amendment.
Few understand how lockdowns are ripples on these troubled
waters. Decades of counterinsurgency waged against one subset of society,
branded insurgents for their Marxist ideals has, overtime, shifted to anyone
holding anti-establishment views. The predictive policing of track and trace
and the theory of asymptomatic transmission are the unwelcome repercussions of
the intelligence state seeking total information awareness over its citizens.
Throughout COVID-19 anyone audacious enough to want to think
for themselves or do their own research has had a target painted on their back.
But according to the EU, one third of Europe is
unvaccinated. This correlates precisely with David Galula’s theory of
counterinsurgency, that suggests one third of society is the active minority
‘against the cause,’ who must be neutralised or eliminated.
And for good reason. People are within sniffing distance of
mobilising popular support from the neutral majority and toppling the house of
cards. What follows is a protracted campaign by the establishment to neutralise
the opposition.
It was not so long ago that journalists were called
muckrakers, for digging up dirt on Robber Barrons who, overtime, learned how to
throw muck back, using smear and innuendo, such as ‘conspiracy theorists',
‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘right-wing extremist.’
When Domestic Populations Become the Battlefield
The use of counterinsurgency in the UK goes back to colonial
India in the 1800s. According to historians, this is the first time the British
government used methods of repression and social control against indigenous
communities who were audacious enough to want to liberate their homeland from
Imperialist rule.
Counterinsurgency was used extensively during The Troubles
in Northern Ireland against another anti-imperialist faction, also looking to
liberate their homeland from The Crown. Much of the lessons learned in Northern
Ireland were later transferred into the everyday policing and criminal justice
policies of mainland Britain. And it wasn't just dissenters who were targeted
by these operations, it was anyone with left wing ideals, particularly trade unionists
who, it could be argued, were conspiring with the Kremlin to overthrow parliamentary
democracy.
I draw your attention to the spying
and dirty tricks operations against the 1980s miners' strike. This
continued right up until 2012, when the police and intelligence communities
were implicated in a plot to blacklist construction industry workers deemed
troublesome for their union views. The existence of a secret blacklist was
first exposed in 2009, when investigators from the Information Commissioner's
Office (ICO) raided an unassuming office in Droitwich, Worcestershire, and
discovered an extensive database used by construction firms to vet and
ultimately blacklist workers belonging to trade unions. More than 40 construction firms, including Balfour Beatty and
Sir Robert McAlpine, had been funding the confidential database and
keeping people out of work for many years.
If you want to know what happened to the left, look no
further than Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing
revolutionaries. Decades of infiltration has recalibrated the left into
genuflections of establishment interests. It was the unions who scuppered the
easing of lockdowns in the UK and consistently called on the Department of Education to postpone the reopening of schools. This is
despite the impact which school closures had on marginalised families, who were
statistically more at risk from the fallout of lockdowns, and supposedly
represented by union interests.
From the infiltration of unions to the co-option of
activism, a judge-led public enquiry in 2016 revealed 144
undercover police operations had infiltrated and spied on more than 1,000
political groups in long term deployments since 1968. With covert spymasters
rising in the ranks to hold influential leadership positions, guiding policy
and strategy, and in some cases, radicalising those movements from within to
damage their reputation and weaken public support.
We also need to talk about big philanthropy. George Soros’
Open Foundation is the largest global donor to the twenty-first century’s equivalent
of activist groups. The agitprop used in the former Soviet Union evolved,
overtime, into the masthead of Extinction Rebellion. A motley crew of
eco-warriors courted by high profile financial donors and aligned
ideologically with the very multinational energy corporations they are
supposedly at odds with. The theory of climate change came out of the UN,
organiser of COP20, for what reason ER had to protest the event is anyone’s
guess.
ER doner, George Soros, is also a seed investor
in Avaaz, often cited as the world’s largest and most
powerful online activist network. When the US was on the brink of insurrection,
following the first lockdown, Black Lives Matter entered the fray, not so much
a grassroots movement, but a proxy for the Democrats to essentially redirect
the public’s outrage against lockdowns into the wrong, established-endorsed
cause.
Counterinsurgency in the US
In the US, COINTELPRO was a series of illegal operations
conducted by the FBI between 1956-1971, to disrupt, discredit and neutralise
anyone considered a threat to national security. In the loosest possible
definition, this included members of the Women's Liberation Movement and even
the Boy Scouts of America.
And it wasn't just the customary wiretapping, infiltration
and media manipulation, the FBI committed blackmail and murder.
Take for example the infamous forced suicide letter addressed to Martin Luther King that
threatened to release a sex tape of the civil rights leaders’ extramarital
activities, unless he took his own life. Consider also the FBI’s assassination of Black Panther Party chairman Fred
Hampton.
In the 1960’s a Washington Post expose by army intelligence
whistle-blower, Christopher Pyle, revealed a massive surveillance operation run
by the Army, called CONUS Intel, involving thousands of undercover
military agents infiltrating and spying on virtually everybody active on what
they deemed ‘civil disturbances.’ It turns out, many of those targeted had done
nothing even remotely subversive, unless you consider attending a left-wing
college presentation or church meeting, revolutionary.
These programs came to a head in the 1970’s, when an
investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered
decades of serious, systemic abuse by the CIA. This included
intercepting the mail and eavesdropping on the telephone calls of civil rights
and anti-war leaders over two decades. As if predicting the internet as an
instrument for mass surveillance, Senator Frank Church warned that the NSA's
capabilities could "at any time could be turned around on the American
people."
And turned around they were.
USAGM
Before the internet, the deployment of PSYOPS was limited to legacy media and
permitted only on foreign soil. But that all changed in 2013, when the
government granted themselves permission to target ordinary Americans.
Conceived at the end of the cold war as the Broadcasting Board of Governors,
USAGM is a lesser-known government agency charged with broadcasting thousands
of weekly hours of US propaganda to foreign audiences, that has played a major
role in pushing pro-American stories to former Soviet Bloc countries ever since
Perestroika.
Ostensibly concerned with maintaining US interests abroad, USAGM has also been
the primary funder of the Tor Project since inception. Tor, also known as The
Onion Browser, is the mainstay of encrypted, anonymous search used by activists,
hackers, and the anonymous community, if you can get your head around the fact
that the confidential internet activity of anarchists has been framed by a
PSYOP since the get-go.
For decades an anti-propaganda law, known as the Smith-Mundt Act, made it illegal
for the government to conduct PSYOPS against US citizens. But that all changed
in 2013 when the National Defence Authorization Act repealed that law and
granted USAGM a licence to broadcast pro-government propaganda inside the
United States.
To what extent US citizens are being targeted by propaganda
is anyone's guess, since PSYOPS largely take place online, where it's difficult
to distinguish between foreign and domestic audiences.
What we do know is that in 2009 the military budget for winning hearts and
minds at home and abroad had grown by 63% to $4.7 billion annually. At that
time the Pentagon accounted for more than half the Federal Government's $1 billion PR Budget.
An Associated Press (AP) investigation in 2016 revealed that
the Pentagon employed a staggering 40% of the 5,000 working in the Federal
Government's PR machines, with the Department of Defence, far and wide, the
largest and most expensive PR operation of the United States government,
spending more money on public relations than all other departments combined.
Things are not so different in the UK.
During COVID-19 the British government became the biggest national advertiser.
Even tick tock and snapchat were deployed by the Scottish government to push
COVID PSYOPS to children.
Last year Boris Johnson announced record defence spending for an artificial
intelligence agency and the creation of a national cyber force. That’s a group
of militarised computer hackers to conduct offensive operations.
Offensive operations against who, you might ask.
Britain was not at war, but in an article for the Daily Mail last year,
Britain’s top counter terrorism officer, Neil Basu confirmed that the UK was
waging an ideological war against anti vaccination conspiracy theorists.
Ideological wars of this nature typically take place online, where much of the
government's military budget was being spent.
Since the vaccine roll-out there has been a protracted
effort to paint the 33% of British citizens who have a problem with lockdowns
and vaccine mandates, as violent extremists, with one member of the
commentariat drawing parallels with US style militias.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is heading.
The Facebook’s-Intelligence-Harvard Connection
Consistent with the opaque nature of Facebook's origins, shortly
after its launch in 2014, co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz
brought Napster founder Sean Parker on board. At the age of 16, Parker hacked
into the network of a Fortune 500 company and was later arrested and charged by
the FBI. Around this time Parker was recruited by the CIA.
To what end, we don’t know.
What we do know is that Parker brought Peter Thiel to
Facebook as its first outside investor. Theil, who remains on Facebook’s board,
also sits on the Steering Committee of globalist think tank, the Bilderberg Group. As previously stated, Thiel
is the founder of Palantir, the spooky intelligence firm pretending to be a
private company.
The CIA would join the FBI, DoD and NSA in becoming a
Palantir customer in 2005, later acquiring an equity stake
in the firm through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. At the time of his
first meetings with Facebook, Theil had been working on resurrecting several
controversial DARPA programs.
Which begs the question: With intelligence assets embedded
in Facebook's management structure from the get-go, is everything as it seems
at 1 Hacker Way?
According to Lauren Smith, writing for Wrong Kind of Green:
“Some of Facebook’s allure to
users is that Mark Zuckerberg and his friends started the company from a
Harvard dorm room and that he remains the chairman and chief operating officer.
If he didn’t exist, he would need to be invented by Facebook’s marketing
department.”
By the same token, if Facebook didn't exist it would need to
be invented by the Pentagon.
To achieve this, you would need to embed government
officials in Facebook's leadership and governance. Cherry picking your
candidates from, say, the US Department of Treasury, and launching the platform
from an academic institution, Harvard University, for example.
According to the official record, Zuckerberg built the first
version of Facebook at Harvard in 2004. Like J.C.R Licklider before him, he was
a psychology major.
Harvard's President at that time was economist Lawrence
Summers, a career public servant who served as Chief Economist at the World
Bank, Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration, and 8th
Director of the National Economic Council.
Now here's where it gets interesting. Summers' protege,
Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook’s COO since 2008. Sandberg was at the dials during
the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and predictably, manages Facebook’s Washington
relationships. Before Facebook, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff at the
Treasury under Summers and began her career as an economist, also under Summer,
at the World Bank.
Another Summers-Harvard-Treasury connection is Facebook’s
Board Member, Nancy Killefer, who served under Summers as CFO at the Treasury Department.
It doesn’t end there. Facebook’s Chief Business Officer,
Marne Levine also served under Summers at the Department of Treasury, National
Economic Council and Harvard University.
The CIA connection is Robert M. Kimmet. According
to West Point, Kimmet “has contributed significantly to our nation’s
security…seamlessly blending the roles of soldier, statesman and businessman.
In addition to serving on Facebook's board of Directors, Kimmet is a National
Security Adviser to the CIA, and the recipient of the CIA
Director’s Award.
The icing on the cake, however, is former DAPRA Director,
Regina Dugan, who joined Facebook’s hardware lab, Building 8, in 2016, to roll
out a number of mysterious DARPA funded-projects that would hack people’s minds with brain-computer interfaces.
Dugan currently serves as CEO of Welcome
Leap. A technology spin-off of the world's most powerful health
foundation, concerned with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI),
including transdermal vaccines. Welcome Leap brings DARPA’s
military-intelligence innovation to “the most pressing global health challenges
of our time,” called COVID-19.
Connecting the dots: Welcome Leap was launched at the World
Economic Forum, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its
founder is Jeremy Ferrar, former SAGE member, long-time collaborator of Chris Witty and
Neil Ferguson and the patsy taking the wrap for the Wuhan leak
cover-up story.
George Carlin wasn't joking when he said: ‘it's one big
club, and you're not in it.’
As luck would have it, just before Duggan’s arrival at
Facebook, the social media giant orchestrated the controversial mood
manipulation PSYOP, known as the Social
Contagion Study. The experiment would anticipate the role social
media went onto play during the pandemic.
In the study, Facebook manipulated the posts of 700,000
unsuspecting Facebook users to determine the extent to which emotional states
can be transmitted across social media. To achieve this, they altered the news
feed content of users to control the number of posts that contained positive or
negative charged emotions. As you would expect, the findings of the study
revealed that negative feeds caused users to make negative posts, whereas
positive feeds resulted in users making positive posts. In other words,
Facebook is not only a fertile ground for emotional manipulation, but emotions
can also be contagious across its networks.
Once we understand this, it becomes clear how fear of a disease, which
predominantly targeted people beyond life expectancy with multiple
comorbidities who were dying anyway, spread like wildfire in the wake of the
Wuhan Virus. In locking down the UK, Boris Johnson warned the British public
that we would all lose family members to the disease. When nothing could be
further from the truth. The pandemic largely happened in the flawed doomsday
modelling of epidemiologists, it happened across a corporate united in whipping
up mass hysteria, and it happened on social media platforms like Facebook,
where our social networks were weaponised as echo chambers of the
fear-narrative. It wasn’t so much a pandemic, but the social contagion
experiment playing out in real time.
But there was more than just social media manipulating our emotional states,
fear, shame, and scapegoating was fife throughout as the British government
deployed behavioural economics to, essentially, nudge the public towards
compliance.
Launched under David Cameron's Government, the Behavioural
Insights Team (BIT), who are affectionately known as the Nudge Unit, are a team
of crack psychologists and career civil servants tasked with positively
influencing appropriate behaviour with tiny changes.
But according to whose measure of appropriate behaviour, exactly?
A clue lies in the fact that the Nudge Unit was directed by
Sir Mark Sedwill during the first lockdown. He’s one of Britain’s most senior
national security advisors with links to M15 and MI6.
Put another way, that’s an intelligence operative ruling the British people by
psychological manipulation, though we are led to believe that in a democracy -
government is an agency of the people and parliament is given force of law by
the will of the people.
But what happens when our consent is manipulated by those in
power?
One consequence is that the foxes take charge of the chicken
coop. Another is that we begin to see drastic changes to the constitutional
landscape, as politicians acquire impunity from public scrutiny and an entire
nation is kept under house arrest.
But this demonisation of the masses is also the backwash of
a protracted counterinsurgency crusade waged against ordinary folks. When the
Berlin wall came down in the nineties and decades of counterinsurgency was
rendered obsolete, the battle-lines moved from East to the West, from the
Soviets to the lower orders of society. The mythos of communist infiltration,
that gave rise to the threat of terrorism, is the ancestor of today’s
biosecurity state. A government that tightens its grip, using fear of a common
enemy, will find no shortage of common enemies, to continue tightening its
grip.
Conclusions
Strong-arming the world’s population under the rubric of
biosecurity would not have been possible without the internet, and if the
expulsion of the military and intelligence community from academic institutions
in the 1960's had not resulted in the creation of Silicon Valley, they would
not have acquired total information awareness, the precursor to the Green Pass.
But this formidable goal also caused the US to morph into
the opponent it had been fighting during the cold war, as predicted by public
intellectuals in the 1960s.
And so, with an annual budget of $750 billion and 23,000
military and civilian personnel in their employment, the Pentagon failed to
denounce what many armchair researchers called out in the early days of the
pandemic. That a global coup was underway was patently obvious, as crisis
actors played dead in Wuhan, China.
Instead, those charged with protecting the west from
Soviet-style putsch failed to apprehend it happening right under their noses.
It's not so much that they were caught with their trousers down, it’s that they
aided and abetted the coop. Years of fighting a statist, expansionist adversary,
caused the intelligence state to mutate into their nemesis, namely China.
It is uncanny that the country with the worst human rights
record on earth became the global pacemaker for lockdowns, as western
democracies exonerated their existential threat and bowed to China’s distinct
brand of tyranny.
As a result, the big tech data analytics pioneered by
Silicon Valley luminaries, that was road tested in China, finally landed on the
shorelines of western democracies.
Another story entirely is the infiltration of
sovereign nation states by the United Nations, whose special agency, the WHO,
sparked the events that would lead to the fall of the West. In keeping with
tradition, the UN's foundation at Bretton Woods was infiltrated by communist
spies, driven by socialist values, and funded by powerful petroleum dollars.
The same corporations looking to shore up new markets for their monopolies, who
would leave their legacy to Silicon Valley.
In an ironic twist of fate, the intelligence state created
at the end of world war II, under the National Security Act, conceived the very
corporations that would bring about the end of constitutional democracy, that
would author a new bill of rights from their own community standards de jour,
and that would shift us from sovereign nation states to global governance, into
the collectivist future the Pentagon had been charged with protecting us from.
Nowadays, it doesn't matter if you're in the dusty slew of a
Calcutta slum or enjoying pristine views over Central Park, everyone is subject
to the same scrutiny and surveillance, policed by the same community standards,
manipulated by the same algorithms, and indexed by the same intelligence
agencies. No matter where you are, Silicon Valley is limiting what information
you can see, share, communicate and learn from online. They are raising your
kids, shaping your worldview and in the wake of COVID-19 and climate change,
they have assumed the role of science administrator.
Founded on the principles of freedom of expression and
heralded as a liberating new frontier for humanity, the internet has
criminalised free speech, divorced it from our nature and ensnared us under a
dragnet of surveillance.
But above all else, cyberspace has bought into existence a
substructure of reality that is cannibalising the five-sensory world, while
forcing humanity to embark on the greatest exodus in human history, from the
tangible world to the digital nexus, from our real lives to the metaverse.
As Goethe quote goes ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved
than those who falsely believe they are free.’ Namely, anyone still looking
through rose-tinted lenses in the digital age, oblivious to the fact they are
victims of systematic addiction. The bread and circuses of the internet
influences the same dopamine rewards centres and neural circuitry motivators as
slot machines, cigarettes, and cocaine, as was originally intended by
psychologists like JCR Licklider, at the helm of this new technology that would
exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.
And as we descend further into the maelstrom of the digital
age, the algorithms will get smarter, the psychological drivers will become
more persuasive and digital rubric will become more real. Until eventually we
will lose touch with reality altogether. But don't worry, this war of attrition
is happening in conjunction with the roll out of new software and devices, and
most will be too busy building their digital avatars or dissenting on social
media to know any better.
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