From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

Senior research psychologist and Google critic Dr. Robert Epstein told popular podcast host Joe Rogan on Wednesday that a “free and fair election” is an “illusion” now, warning about the rise of the “technological elite.”

In June 2019, Epstein addressed Congress over his concerns that Google not only poses a “serious threat to democracy and human autonomy,” but also advising how the lawmakers could “end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search.” Appearing on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Epstein explained his belief that there hasn’t been a “free and fair election” nationally since 2012, because tech has been used to manipulate public opinion.

“We are finding overwhelming evidence that they are very deliberately and systematically messing with us and our elections, especially. I personally believe that as of 2012 the free and fair election, at least at the national level, has not existed,” Epstein said. “It’s just been manipulated since 2012. I say this in part because I met one of the people on Google’s tech team — on Obama’s Tech Team, I should say — which was being run by Eric Schmidt, head of Google at the time.”

“I talked to him at great length about what the tech team was doing. They had full access to all of Google’s shenanigans, all those manipulations and one member of that team, asked by a reporter, how many of the four points by which Obama won, how many of those points did he get from the tech team? And the guy said … two of the points came from us. Now Obama won by 5 million votes, roughly, and two out of four points came from the tech team — that’s two and a half million votes,” Epstein said.

Epstein, along with several others at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), released a study that claimed tech companies have the ability to influence decisions of undecided voters through search suggestions on search engines. The Google whistleblower told the Daily Caller News Foundation that search engine operators controlling search suggestions could have “the power to shift a large number of votes without people’s awareness.”

Epstein continued to call out the 2016 election between former President Donald Trump and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, stating that if Google’s interference had been taken out, the popular vote “would have been tied.”

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“By 2016 I had calculated that Google could shift — and it would be toward Hillary Clinton of course, whom I supported at the time — that Google could shift between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton in that election with no one knowing. She won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes,” Epstein said. “If you take Google out of that election the popular vote would have been tied. Couple days after that election everyone — all the leaders in Google get up on stage … and they’re talking to all of Google’s 100,000 employees and one by one they’re going up to the mic and saying, ‘We are never going to let that happen again.’”

The Google whistleblower added that between President Joe Biden and Trump, if Google had been taken “out of the equation,” Trump would have won “11 out of 13 swing states instead of five.”

“So going forward from roughly 2012 I think the free and fair election has been an illusion, an illusion. And this is something — it’s very weird and kind of ironic, but this is something that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in that last speech of his farewell speech he warned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, everyone’s heard about that,” Epstein continued.

“But he also warned about the rise of a technological elite that could someday control public policy without anyone knowing. And the technological elite are now in control. That’s what we have. That’s where I get back to my ranting and my pain because I realize no one is paying attention! Eisenhower said we have to be alert or this will happen,” Epstein said.

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Cecilie Jilkova 

The UN committee approved the text of the Convention on Combating Cybercrime. Human rights organizations and information technology experts have called it a threat to democracy and the free world.

“One of the world’s most dangerous surveillance treaties was approved with a standing ovation,” wrote Austrian digital rights group Epicenter Works.

The UN General Assembly is now due to vote on the adoption of the Convention in September.

“It can be assumed that the treaty will be accepted without difficulty at the UN General Assembly in September, and will thus be officially considered a UN convention. After that, it will be available for signature and subsequently it can be ratified,” said political advisor Tanja Fachathalerová. “It can be assumed that it will not be a big problem to achieve the necessary forty ratifications, which are necessary for the treaty to enter into force.”

Legitimization of Repression against Journalists and Opponents

The proposed international treaty aims to combat cybercrime and improve international cooperation between law enforcement agencies. However, more than a hundred human and civil rights organizations around the world have warned of a serious threat to human rights and criticized the fact that the text of the treaty lacks adequate safeguards. According to them, the planned agreement would oblige UN member states to introduce comprehensive measures for the supervision of a wide range of crimes.

“The contract is really a surveillance agreement with too few provisions on data protection and human rights. In practice, it legitimizes the more repressive measures against political opponents or journalists that we now see in authoritarian states,” writes the netzpolitik.org server.

China and Russia Stood at the Beginning of the Convention

It all started with a UN resolution initiated in 2019 by Russia, China, and other countries (such as Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and Uzbekistan) with 88 votes in favor, 58 against, and 34 abstentions.

European states have proposed changes, but according to experts, the resulting compromise does not even meet the conditions necessary to preserve privacy and protect human rights.

“Unfortunately, a data access treaty has been drawn up that will allow governments around the world to exchange citizens’ personal information in perpetual secrecy in the event of any crime the two governments agree is ‘serious.’ This would include eavesdropping on location and real-time communications around the world, and force IT workers to divulge passwords or other access keys that would compromise the security of global systems that billions of people rely on every day. And it’s not just private sector systems – government systems are also at risk,” said Nick Ashton-Hart, Digital Economy Policy Director at APCO, who is also leading the Cybersecurity Tech Accord delegation to the Convention negotiations.

The Threat of Criminal Prosecution of Journalists and White Hackers

The Ashton-Hart treaty also puts journalists and whistleblowers at risk of prosecution. The International Press Institute was so concerned about this risk that it placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post. Independent security experts around the world also warned in February that they could face criminal prosecution for their work protecting IT systems from cybercriminals under the draft Convention.

Governments Could Prosecute Children for Sexting

“Incredibly, the text expressly allows governments to prosecute children for “sexting” in the same article (14) that is supposed to protect them from sexual predators. The article also puts people working in charities who help bring predators to justice at risk of prosecution because they need access to material created by predators as part of their work. Civil society advocates have repeatedly pointed out this obvious deficiency, but to no avail,” Ashton-Hart said.

Concerns about Freedom of Expression

According to experts, companies that operate internationally will also be exposed to increased legal and reputational risk after the arrest of employees. The private data of individuals and vulnerable communities can be accessed by law enforcement agencies around the world, even in cases where the perpetrators’ actions are not criminal in their place of residence or in cases that raise significant concerns about freedom of expression.

Cooperation between authorities and states can be kept secret without transparency about how governments use the treaty, or without provisions that allow companies to challenge law enforcement requests, even if they are illegal.

Criticizing Leaders as a Crime?

“Facilitating collusion in any ‘serious’ crime opens the door to ‘crimes’ such as criticizing leaders or persecuting minorities,” writes Ashton-Hart in his analysis.

On August 13, the International Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest and most representative representative of the private sector, openly called on the UN not to adopt the convention at the General Assembly in September.

“If governments fail again to protect the international human rights legal framework they so often vociferously support, then new, dangerous norms created in international law will haunt us for decades to come,” Ashton-Hart said.

Republished from the author’s Substack