A third series of “Twitter Files,”published on Friday evening, offered details into the platform’s decision to ban the personal account of Donald Trump while he was still the sitting US president, with more revelations promised for the weekend.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who authored the first expose last week, began sharing the saga of Trump’s ban covering the period between October 2020 and January 6, 2021.

“We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies,” Taibbi wrote.

The drop includes Twitter’s internal communications of clear historical importance, as the company employees recognized this was a “landmark moment in the annals of speech,” the first time they suspended a sitting head of state.

Trump was banned on January 8, after a “close review” of how his tweets were “being received and interpreted on and off Twitter,” the company said at the time. His last tweets had included a video message urging his supporters not to break the law and peacefully depart from the US Capitol, but also his claim that the 2020 election had not been legitimate, which Twitter had declared unacceptable.

 

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BY GLENN GREENWALD.

 

The Media's Deranged Hysteria Over Elon Musk's Promised Restoration of Free SpeechIt was easy to predict that there would be an all-out war from Western power centers if Musk sought to mildly reduce censorship on Twitter. Still, the media outdid itself.

 

 

It is hard to overstate how manic, primal and unhinged is the reaction of corporate media employees to the mere prospect that new Twitter owner Elon Musk may restore a modicum of greater free speech to that platform. It was easy to predict — back when Musk was merely toying with the idea of buying Twitter and loosening some of its censorship restrictions — that there would be an all-out attack from Western power centers if he tried. Online censorship has become one of the most potent propaganda weapons they possess, and there is no way they will allow anyone to dilute it even mildly without attempting to destroy them. Even with that expectation in place of what was to come, the liberal sector of the corporate media (by far the most dominant media sector) really outdid itself when it came to group-think panic, rhetorical excess, and reckless and shrill accusations. 

In unison, these media outlets decreed that not only would greater free speech on Twitter usher in the usual parade of horribles they trot out when demanding censorship — disinformation, hate speech, attacks on the “marginalized,” etc. etc. — but this time they severely escalated their rhetorical hysteria by claiming that Musk would literally cause mass murder by permitting a broader range of political opinion to be aired. The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz even warned of supernatural demons that would be unleashed by these new free speech policies, as she talked to a handful of obviously neurotic pro-censorship “experts” and then wrote about these thinly disguised therapy sessions with those neurotics under this headline: “‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts.”

But the self-evident absurdity of this laughable meltdown and the ease of mocking it should not obscure that there are lurking within these episodes some genuinely insidious and serious dangers. These preposterous media employees are just the sideshow. But what they are doing, unwittingly or otherwise, is laying the groundwork for far less frivolous and more serious people to use the attacks on Musk to further fortify the regime of censorship they have been constructing: the limitlessly demonizing language heaped on him, the success they have already had in driving away many if not most corporate advertisers from Twitter, the threats to once again abuse the monopoly power of Google and Apple to destroy Twitter or at least cripple it if Musk does not comply with their censorship orders (as they succeeded in doing last year to the free speech site Parler when it became the most-downloaded app in the country and refused to censor on demand).

To examine the media tactics being invoked, and to highlight the underlying conflicts among power centers at stake in this battle, we devoted our monologue to this topic as part of Friday night's episode of the pre-launch test-runs we are airing of our new live SYSTEM UPDATE program, soon to debut nightly on Rumble. As we explained last week, these test-run episodes are designed to air for now solely on the Locals platform, and are available for now exclusively to our Substack and Locals subscribers, in order to elicit feedback and help us perfect the show as we prepare for our debut on Rumble. The audience feedback we received after our first episode and the first interactive after-show we did was genuinely helpful, and we spent the week incorporating many of our audience's suggestions in order to elevate the quality of our program as we head toward our launch.

But given the timeliness of our latest monologue to these still-unfolding events, as well as the fact that we were able to keep the test-run glitches to a minimum, we have posted this new full thirty-minute monologue on Rumble, for anyone to watch here. Reflecting the success we believe we can achieve in reaching a large new audience with our program, the number of viewers we attracted to that test-run show before the first full day has already exceeded 100,000: on a Saturday, over Thanksgiving weekend.

As we always have done and will continue to do with all video broadcasts and video reporting we do, we have created and are posting a full transcript of the monologue for subscribers only, available below, for those who prefer to read rather than watch (though we do believe that the video component of the show allows us to use another dimension in conveying our reporting, one of the main reasons we committed to produce this new live program on Rumble). But for those who prefer to read, the transcript of our Musk analysis is below; those wishing to watch our new SYSTEM UPDATE monologue can do so by clicking this link and then watch the video on Rumble.

 

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AS MENTIONED EARLIER, 99 PER CENT OF JOURNALISTS ARE AFRAID OF THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS... WHY?

SEVERAL FOLDS: FIRST SHOULD THEY DEVIATE FROM THE MAIN STREAM OFFICIAL NARRATIVE, THEY COULD LOOSE THEIR JOBS. SECOND, THEY ARE TOO LAZY TO INVESTIGATE "THE OTHER SIDE"... THIRD, THEY ARE AFRAID OF FINDING "THE TRUTH".... THIS IS WHY WE HARP ON THE TURDY NAZI ZELENSKY.....

 

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BY EKANERINA BLINOVA

 

American author Michael Shellenberger released the seventh tranche of the explosive "Twitter Files" earlier this week to shed light on the FBI's censorship and meddling with the platform. New Twitter owner Elon Musk made internal Twitter files available for several US investigative journalists in December.

The recently released sixth and seventh batches of the Twitter Files shed light on the FBI's instructions to censor specific tweets and accounts for "violating" the company's terms of service.

The internal documents also lifted the veil of secrecy on how the bureau launched an apparent damage control operation prior to the publication of the New York Post's bombshell concerning Hunter Biden's laptop. 

On top of that, an email by Twitter's former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker revealed that the platform collected a staggering $3 million from the bureau at least on one occassion.

 

"My opinion - based on the evidence available - is the FBI did this because the FBI is fundamentally corrupt," Jason Goodman, a US investigative journalist and founder of Crowdsource the Truth, told Sputnik. "Failure to investigate Hunter Biden based on the evidence on the laptop is bad enough. Evidence being revealed now by Twitter’s new management suggests the FBI actively worked to protect Hunter Biden from public scrutiny and hide their own lack of enforcement action. Broad knowledge of the evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop would certainly have led to public outcry at least for further investigation. We have never witnessed such a brazen criminal act by a US government agency so nakedly exposed. For the past two years, any individual who even debates these facts online loses access to the major social media platforms."

 

The Twitter Files exposure apparently hit the FBI's raw nerve as the bureau issued an official statement claiming that "the men and women of the FBI" were doing their job, while "conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency."

While commenting on the bureau's statement, one prominent legal expert remarked that it is not clear "what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter's censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role."

 

How It All Began

Make no mistake, this started long ago, noted Goodman: in fact, the groundwork was laid after September 11, 2001, with the passage of the Patriot Act.

 

"Prior to that, Americans were protected from undue search and seizure by the fourth amendment of the constitution," the journalist explained. "In the newfound 'war on terror' the Patriot Act was sold to the American public as increased security. But it introduced several unconstitutional new laws and new law enforcement tools that removed our constitutional protection. One such tool was the National Security Letter (NSL)."

 

Goodman has drawn attention to the fact that prior to the advent of NSLs, investigators needed to get a warrant from a judge and had to have probable cause supported by some kind of evidence before they could lawfully investigate a person or their property, including electronic accounts, like email or Twitter.

However, with the Patriot Act, the FBI could simply write up an NSL under the suspicion that an individual was a national security threat and launch a probe into them, according to the journalist. "No warrant or evidence was required," Goodman added. Moreover, the bureau could also reject the requests of those asking for proof on the basis that the evidence would risk revealing sources and methods and was also a national security threat, according to the journalist.

"These newfound powers were quickly and consistently abused," Goodman continued. "Former FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni was admonished by both the House and the Senate for gross abuses of NSLs and other unconstitutional acts."

However, it appears that the US Congress' attempts to rein in the bureau have not borne any fruit and the FBI has only grown more brazen in the years since.

 

"By alleging that the FBI was engaged in a counterintelligence investigation, they no longer had to adhere to the same rules or obey the constitutional protections that existed previously," said Goodman. "This is exactly how the FBI began their shambolic investigation into the so-called Russian collusion with Trump."

 

Hunter's and Hillary's Emails & APT28

Meanwhile, the story of FBI's attempts to shield Hunter Biden evokes strong memories of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack amid the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The disclosure of Hunter's bombshell emails was downplayed and smeared as a "hack" and "disinformation" by "Russian APT28" just as the 2016 DNC email leak was.

According to Shellenberger, the bureau took Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" from Mac Isaac, a Delaware repair shop owner, on December 9, 2019. By August 2020, Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had found alleged evidence of criminal activity on the device. So Isaac contacted lawyer Rudy Giuliani, "who was under FBI surveillance at the time," and provided him with a copy of the laptop's hard disk. In early October, Guiliani gave the disk to the New York Post.

On October 13, 2020, a day before the Post planned to release its bombshell, "FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Twitter's then-Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter," Shellinberger revealed citing internal Twitter documents. On October 14, 2020, the bombshell article saw the light of day but soon was banned and suppressed by major Silicon Valley giants, including Twitter.

But that is not all. According to Yoel Roth's testimony, during all of 2020, the FBI warned him about the forthcoming Russian "hack and leak" operation "involving Hunter Biden" prior to the 2020 election. The bureau particularly referred to APT28, claiming that it's a group of Russian hackers linked to Moscow's intelligence services. In one of his recent interviews, Roth said that when Hunter's emails finally emerged "it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells."

The "laptop from hell" posed a challenge to Hunter's father, the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, as the bombshell suggested that the latter not only knew but also participated in his son's murky financial schemes.

Similarly, the 2016 DNC leak threatened the Clinton campaign, demonstrating, in particular, that the party's primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary. It was Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann who requested cyber security firm CrowdStrike's help in investigating the alleged DNC hack.

 

CrowdStrike "detected" and "attributed" the alleged breach of DNC servers to Russia during the 2016 election cycle. The company claimed that the perpetrators were "two Russian espionage groups": Cozy Bear (APT29) and Fancy Bear (APT28), suggesting with a "low" to "medium"-level of confidence that they may be affiliated with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and Main Intelligence Department (GRU), respectively. Moscow denied the claim as absurd.

For its part, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike's conclusions, although the bureau has never physically examined the DNC servers and has only been provided with their "digital copies" instead.

According to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former US intelligence officers working within the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, there had been no hack: it was an inside job. Moreover, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted under oath in 2017 that the company does not have "concrete evidence" that the alleged "Russian hackers" exfiltrated any data from the servers.

The story of the DNC "hack" played a big role in smearing Russia and linking Donald Trump to Moscow. The Dems claimed that Moscow "hacked" the emails to help Trump win the 2016 elections. In summer 2016, the FBI launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane on the pretext of alleged "collusion" between Trump and the Kremlin. However, Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation found no evidence to back the allegations, which were rubbished by Moscow from the very start as nonsensical.

 

"The true origin of the Russiagate hoax has not yet been revealed but it is becoming increasingly clear that top executives in the FBI have been involved in an ongoing coverup for a very long time," said Goodman. "APT28 is likely a concoction of Dmitri Alperovitch’s Crowdstrike, which itself is an obvious FBI cutout. Crowdstrike co-founder Shawn Henry left the FBI to create the company, then shortly thereafter received $150 million from Google. Sounds fair enough but think about that for a moment. Google cannot easily hand $150 million to the FBI, but they can invest whatever they want in a startup tech company."

 

It is not clear if the US public understands the legal games the FBI can play, according to the journalist.

"The FBI’s infiltration of Twitter is the tippy top of tip of the upper edge of the tip of the iceberg," Goodman remarked. "We need to understand just how many private companies and non-profit organizations are secretly working with or for the incredibly dangerous and subversive US 'Intelligence' community. This hidden-in-plain-sight network of government agencies, non-profit organizations, and private industry is what is spoken of as the 'Deep State'."

 

Operation Mockingbird and Church Committee

The FBI's attempts to control and infiltrate the work of social media giants resembles nothing so much as the US intelligence Operation Mockingbird which was first mentioned by CIA Director William Colby during his briefing to the Justice Department on December 31, 1974.

Later, the issue was touched upon by Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone in 1977. Bernstein revealed how numerous journalists, including Pulitzer-prize winners, wrote fake stories and disseminated propaganda at the CIA's behest during the Cold War. The scale of the CIA's huge international media network was described by one CIA official as ranging from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper. According to the US mainstream press, the program has never been officially discontinued.

"It is essentially an extension of Operation Mockingbird," Goodman said about the US intelligence community's collusion with Big Tech. "The revelations of the Church Committee showed us the CIA’s intention. There is no reason to believe they would change. We see these 'retired' intelligence people on the news all the time. It should be obvious to anyone looking at the evidence if the FBI or any law enforcement or intelligence agency is doing anything other than tracking dangerous criminals on Twitter, they should not be doing it."

The Church Committee was a US Senate select committee that investigated abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS in 1975.

Presently, it's not a matter of the FBI getting away with what it has done (they already have), this is "an inflection point like none other in American history," according to the journalist.

 

"We are in a dangerous moment," Goodman warned. "The United States has become a neofascist technocratic autocracy. The new Congress must take bold steps to shut this down immediately and begin the journey back to the constitutional republic that was established in 1776 or it will only get worse (…) Another thing the Patriot Act created that most people are not aware of is the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. It is an interagency intelligence-sharing operation overseen by the FBI. Critics say it eliminates the compartmentalization that is in place to prevent the types of abuses that are commonplace today. Without oversight, who knows what these interagency operations are capable of."

 

 

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https://sputniknews.com/20221224/twitter-files-fbis-infiltration-of-big-tech-is-step-on-path-to-totalitarian-state-journo-warns-1105753460.html

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/40358

 

https://www.rt.com/news/568848-snowden-covid-spying-normalized/

 

 

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