Censorship Industrial Complex
Bipartisan US Coalition Finally Tells Europe, and the FBI, to Shove It
FLICKER OF HOPE? Left, Senator Ron Wyden. Middle, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Right, Rep. Andy Biggs
Racket News By Matt Taibbi
While J.D. Vance was speaking in Munich, the U.K. was demanding encrypted data from Apple. For the first time in nine years, America may fight back
Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts”:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.…
[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.
This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.
The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.
The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter.
One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.
Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.
The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act. This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose”:
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THE IPA: Bulk warrants, warrants by location, warrants on groups with “common purpose”
The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”
Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”
Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit.” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”
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Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest:
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N**** PLEASE: British police invoked the Investigatory Powers Act to get user information about nonwhite football fans
British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:
While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.
God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.
Even without a central “incident,” European officials have been pursuing the dream of full “transparency” into user data ever since, often with support from American politicians and pundits. It was not long ago that Taylor Lorenz was writing outrage porn in the New York Times about the “unconstrained” and “unfettered conversations” on the Clubhouse App. As Lorenz noted, Clubhouse simply by being hard to track aroused the hostility of German authorities, who wrote to remind the firm about European citizens’ “right to erasure” and “transparent information”:
Providers offering services to European users must respect their rights to transparent information, the right of access, the right to erasure and the right to object.
Eventually, the EU tried to submarine end-to-end encryption through dystopian bills like “Chat Control,” which would have required platforms to actively scan user activity for prohibited behavior. This concept was widely criticized even in Europe, and in the States, which was mostly still in the grip of “freedom causes Trump” mania, TechCrunch called it “Hella Scary.”
Chat Control just barely stalled out in October, thanks to the Dutch, but Europe’s feelings about encryption were still more than made clear with this past summer’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. That event was largely cheered in the U.S. press, where Durov was accused of actively “hiding illegal behavior,” and turning his platform into a “misinformation hot spot” used by “far right groups,” “neo-Nazis,” and “Proud Boys and QAnon conspiracy theorists.” The consensus was Durov himself was helping sink the concept of encryption.
“If we assume this becomes a fight about encryption, it is kind of bad to have a defendant who looks irresponsible,” was how Stanford Cyber Policy Analyst Daphne Keller described Durov to the New York Times after his arrest.
The Durov arrest may have marked the moment of peak influence for the cyber-spook movement. Though the Investigatory Powers Act was a major political surveillance tool, it was far from the only important law of its type, or the most powerful. The IPA was in fact just one of a long list of acronyms mostly unfamiliar to American news consumers, from France’s LCEN to Germany’s NetzDG to the EU’s TERREG as well as its Code of Practice on Disinformation and Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, among many others. American authorities usually followed the pattern in the case of encryption and the IPA, doing informally what European counterparts were able to effect openly and with the force of law.
Now however it looks like efforts by government officials to completely wipe out encryption have failed, and events have taken a new turn. “Wild,” is how the Senate aide characterized the Wyden-Biggs letter, resuming another bipartisan fight put on hold nine years ago. “I’d forgotten what this looks like.”
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IRONY ALERT: Germans protesting FBI efforts to break iPhone encryption, 2016
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Censorship Industrial Complex
Canadian bishops condemn Liberal ‘hate speech’ proposal that could criminalize quoting Scripture
From LifeSiteNews
Canada’s Catholic bishops have condemned the proposed amendments to Bill C-9 warning that quoting the Bible in good faith could become punishable by up to two years in prison.
The Canadian Catholic bishops have condemned proposed restrictions on quoting religious texts, which would potentially criminalize sharing Bible passages.
In a December 4 letter to Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) advocated against proposed amendments to Bill C-9, the “Combating Hate Act,” to allow Canadians to be punished for quoting Scripture.
“[T]he proposed elimination of the ‘good faith’ religious-text defence raises significant concerns,” the letter, signed by CCCB President Bishop Pierre Goudreault, explained. “This narrowly framed exemption has served for many years as an essential safeguard to ensure that Canadians are not criminally prosecuted for their sincere, truth-seeking expression of beliefs made without animus and grounded in long-standing religious traditions.”
Goudreault pointed out that “the removal of this provision risks creating uncertainty for faith communities, clergy, educators, and others who may fear that the expression of traditional moral or doctrinal teachings could be misinterpreted as hate speech and could subject the speaker to proceedings that threaten imprisonment of up to two years.”
“As legal experts have noted, the public’s understanding of hate-speech and its legal implications are often far broader than what the Criminal Code actually captures,” the letter continued. “Eliminating a clear statutory safeguard will likely therefore have a chilling effect on religious expression, even if prosecutions remain unlikely in practice.”
In conclusion, Goudreault recommended that Liberals either scrap the proposed amendment or issue a statement clarifying that “good-faith religious expression, teaching, and preaching will not be subject to criminal prosecution under the hate-propaganda provisions.”
He further suggested that the Liberals “commit to broad consultation with religious leaders, legal experts, and civil liberties organizations before any amendments are made to Bill C-9 that would affect religious freedom.”
“We believe it is possible to achieve the shared objective of promoting a society free from genuine hatred while also upholding the constitutional rights of millions of Canadians who draw moral and spiritual guidance from their faith traditions,” the letter continued.
As LifeSiteNews reported earlier this week, inside government sources revealed that Liberals agreed to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate speech laws, as part of a deal with the Bloc Québécois to keep Liberals in power.
Bill C-9, as reported by LifeSiteNews, has been blasted by constitutional experts as empowering police and the government to go after those it deems to have violated a person’s “feelings” in a “hateful” way.
Now, the Bloc amendment seeks to further restrict free speech. The amendment would remove the “religious exemption” defense, which has historically protected individuals from conviction for willful promotion of hatred if the statements were made “in good faith” and based on a “religious subject” or a “sincerely held” interpretation of religious texts such as passages from the Bible, Quran, or Torah.
As a result, quoting the Bible, Quran, or Torah to condemn abortion, homosexuality, or LGBT propaganda could be considered criminal activity.
Shortly after the proposed amendment was shared on social media, Conservatives launched a petition, calling “on the Liberal government to protect religious freedom, uphold the right to read and share sacred texts, and prevent government overreach into matters of faith.”
Already, in October, Liberal MP Marc Miller said that certain passages of the Bible are “hateful” because of what it says about homosexuality and those who recite the passages should be jailed.
“Clearly there are situations in these texts where these statements are hateful,” Miller said. “They should not be used to invoke or be a defense, and there should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges.”
His comments were immediately blasted by Conservative politicians throughout Canada, with Alberta provincial Conservative MLA and Minister of Municipal Affairs Dan Williams saying, “I find it abhorrent when MPs sitting in Ottawa – or anyone in positions of power – use their voice to attack faith.”
corbettreport.com
But it’s another thing altogether for those conspirators to follow through on that psyop and actually achieve their desired end goal: the erection of the biosecurity state.
For those of us who managed to maintain our sanity over the last five years, the question is not whether COVID was a psyop—the answer to that question was obvious from the start—but whether the COVID conspirators have accomplished their objectives.
So, where do we stand in 2025? Did the COVID scamsters win?
Lockdowns
One of the intended effects of the COVID psyop was to take the concept of lockdowns and social distancing from the realm of obscure authoritarian fantasy to stone-cold reality.
As I pointed out in my 2020 video on “What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns,” the idea of using school shutdowns, mandatory lockdowns and social distancing as pandemic prevention measures was first floated by Albequerque high school student Laura Glass for her local science fair project. (For those who are interested, she won third place!)
Prior to 2020, the notion of locking down healthy populations to prevent the spread of disease was still pie-in-the-sky fantasy. No government had seriously attempted to impose lockdowns or social distancing on a mass scale and the very thought of mass quarantines and government-imposed, electronically monitored lockdowns would have been laughed off as conspiracy paranoia.
On the other side of the 2020 divide, however, lockdowns became not only thinkable but an essential tool in the biosecurity state’s toolbelt.
Since 2020, for example, we have seen the extent to which lockdowns penetrated the popular imagination reflected in such ideas as “climate lockdowns.” After all, if locking people in their homes worked for a planetary health emergency, why not use it for a planetary climate emergency?
Yet another example of the mindset shift that has occurred over the past five years arrived last week when the UK Covid-19 Inquiry delivered its verdict that the lockdowns the UK government imposed during the scamdemic were “too little, too late“ and that they could have saved 23,000 lives by locking down earlier.
This is, of course, nonsense. Actually, it’s worse than nonsense; it’s nonsense based on made-up numbers from a known liar. As Off-Guardian point out in their (shadow-banned) tweet on the subject:
For those who don’t know, the tweet is referring to this passage from the inquiry’s report:
Professor Ferguson told the Inquiry that in later work which analyzed the impact of restrictions in England: “we explicitly modelled the counterfactual scenario of moving the lockdown of 23rd March back to 16th March, and estimated mortality … would have been reduced by 48%.“ That could have equated to a reduction in deaths in England from 48,600 to approximately 25,600 in the first wave up to 1 July 2020.
“Professor Ferguson” is, lest we forget, Neil Ferguson, the “virus modeller” (or should that be the “Liberal Lysenko“?) from Imperial College London who produced the computer model suggesting that 500,000 Britons were destined for the grave unless the UK government imposed a national lockdown. Ferguson has since walked back that claim and now denies calling for a lockdown at all, but it should be kept in mind that his about-face came after he was caught breaking the UK lockdown restrictions to carry on an affair with his married lover.
This is also the same Neil Ferguson who used his amazing “virus modeling” powers to predict 50,000 deaths from the UK’s 2002 mad cow outbreak (actual number of deaths: 177) and up to 200 million deaths from a potential, theoretical bird flu outbreak (which has yet to arrive).
Ferguson’s projection of what could have resulted if the government had locked down faster and earlier suffers from the same “garbage in, garbage out” tomfoolery as the Club of Rome’s environmental apocalypticism. Keep in mind that the number of people who would supposedly have been saved by a quicker UK lockdown is based on a fundamentally flawed input: the number of people who the UK government assert died of COVID. Those of us who called out the scam from the start have been noting for years that these COVID death tolls are statistical chicanery, since they rely on the fraudulent claim that everyone who died with COVID—as measured by the scientifically meaningless PCR test—had in fact died of COVID.
In other words, Ferguson’s numbers are plucked out of thin air and aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. They should not be taken seriously by anyone, whatever their opinion on the efficacy of lockdowns.
But, as usual, the damage has been done. The controlled establishment media has run their headlines about the lives that could have been saved by earlier lockdowns, and the type of people who still get their news from these mockingbird repeaters will now be more certain than ever that social distancing and quarantining populations is the right thing to do in the event of a declared health emergency.
Chalk that one up as a win for the COVID scamsters.
QR Codes, Vaccine Passports and Digital ID
Even more important to the would-be medical tyrants than the normalization of lockdowns and social distancing, however, was the creation of the technological infrastructure upon which the biosecurity state is enabled. This digital infrastructure includes:
- the QR codes that people were habituated into scanning before being allowed access to or egress from various quarantine zones;
- the vaccine passports that were used to assess compliance with vaccine mandates; and
- the various contract tracing apps and self-quarantine apps that were employed to keep track of citizens as they moved from place to place.
If you’ve read about my recent experience trying to order breakfast in Malaysia, you’ll know that, once again, the COVIDians have been remarkably successful in achieving their objectives. As I found out during that Malaysian sojourn, scanning QR codes to access online menus and using cashless payment systems to pay for purchases is becoming so normalized in certain parts of the world that it can be difficult to so much as order breakfast without a smartphone and cellular service. Indeed, the smartphone has become a virtual prerequisite for participation in the public space, and it was the scamdemic that allowed the shift to 100% dependence on smartphones to take place.
One recent demonstration of this smartphone requirement for participation in public life came from an email I received this week from a Corbett Reporter in Canada. He was trying to send a registered letter to the US via Canada Post but was informed that his addressed envelope alone would no longer do. Instead, he now had to fill out an online form and print off a special tracking number in order to mail the item. Not owning a smartphone, he was out of luck. He would have to go home, fill out the online forms on his desktop, print out the paperwork and bring it back to the post office. He opted not to send the letter, vowing instead to never again mail anything to the US.
Living in Japan as I do, the only surprising part of his story is that Canada held off making this change in their postal system for so long. Japan Post implemented the same electronic system for international mail four years ago. Of course, at that time the COVID border closures and postal delivery issues were used as the excuse for the intrusive new policy. But, given that country after country is now bringing in similar measures, the reality is clear: the change to a computer-dependent postal system is a global directive that was pushed, using the cover of COVID contagion, during the scamdemic. The end result is that one must either carry their smartphone with them at all times or spend extra time at home filling out online forms and printing off paperwork if they want to send mail internationally.
Of course, all of these technological “upgrades” to our daily experience—from the smartphone postal system to the QR code menus to the cashless payment systems—serve the same agenda. They are meant to pave the way toward the apotheosis of the biosecurity state: the consolidation of all our information into a single government-issued digital identity app. Soon, we will be giving the government real-time access to all of our daily movements, transactions and interactions and will be signing in with government-issued digital credentials everywhere we go online and in real life.
In the event of the next scamdemic, the scammers will hardly have to do anything at all. The QR code check-ins, vaccine passport checks and cashless payments will already be so much a part of our daily life that we’ll hardly notice any new scamdemic-related restrictions on our activities.
That’s another win for Team COVID. But they’re not done yet.
Clot shots
Another key goal of the scamdemic, of course, was to fast track government approval of mRNA and DNA “vaccine” technologies.
We know this, of course, because the conspirators told us as much in their own words. Who can forget the October 2019 Milken Institute-hosted discussion on the “Universal Flu Vaccine“? In case you have forgotten, that was the conference in which such luminaries as Tony Fauci and Rick Bright lamented that the poor, beleaguered Big Pharma corporations were going to have to spend billions of dollars and at least a decade of hard work proving the safety and efficacy of their DNA/mRNA injection techniques…unless some health emergency arose to justify the emergency approval of these experimental technologies.
So, were Fauci and Bright and their co-conspirators successful in their fast-tracking task? Did they circumvent a decade of regulatory approval work for their Big Pharma buddies? Well, if the point was to invoke a health emergency to get emergency approval for these clot shot monstrosities, then we need look no further than “Operation Warp Speed” for proof that the COVID conspirators were, in fact, remarkably successful.
And let’s never forget that Trump considers the Warp Speed MAGA jabs to be “one of the greatest things ever in politics or in the military!”
Lest there be any doubt about Trump’s devotion to this technology, let’s not forget that he hosted an event launching his $500 billion AI-pushing “Stargate” project on his third day in office earlier this year, at which Larry Ellison discussed using AI to develop personalized mRNA cancer vaccines. And just two months ago, Bill Gates used his place of honor at a White House banquet to boast that he and Trump were discussing “vaccines and gene editing” in their joint effort to “tak[e] American innovation to the next level.”
But this isn’t just about Trump, and it isn’t just about what’s happening in the US. This is a worldwide agenda. And, if this smattering of headlines from the past few months is any indication, the COVID era has given a gigantic shot in the arm (pun intended) to the clot shot “vaccine” manufacturers:
Experimental mRNA flu vaccine shows superior efficacy against symptomatic illness (just don’t ask about the side effects)
COVID Vaccine Tech May Reduce Disabilities in Snakebite Victims
Personalized mRNA Vaccines Will Revolutionize Cancer Treatment—If Funding Cuts Don’t Doom Them
The Dawn of Personalized DNA Vaccines
And, exactly in line with my reporting in Who Is Bill Gates? there’s this recent report
New Gates-Funded Microneedle Patch Implant Installs Both mRNA and Quantum Dot Markings Into the Body
Yes, it’s safe to say we are now ensconced in the era of genetic intervention masquerading as “vaccines.”
That’s another win for the WHO mafia.
Mission Accomplished?
I could go on. I haven’t even mentioned yet the passage of the WHO’s pandemic treaty or how its provisions actually encourage the work of the bioweapons industry…in the name of “defense” against such weapons, naturally. (A “poor man’s nuke,” anyone?)
But you get the point. Just as it’s difficult to deny that the COVID scamdemic was the biggest psyop of our lifetime, it’s equally difficult to deny that the perpetrators of that scam have been remarkably successful, achieving so many of their 2030 Agenda items in one fell swoop.
So, did the conspirators win?
The answer to this question is even more important than it might seem at first glance. History, as we know, is written by the winners, so if the WHO goons and their string-pullers and paymasters did indeed win, then our grandchildren will grow up learning about the terrible plague that threatened to wipe out the global population in 2020. They’ll read about how some crazy kooks resisted the loving lockdowns of the government and warned against the life-saving vaccines. They’ll truly believe we were only saved by the skin of our teeth thanks to our benevolent masters imposing lockdowns, mRNA clot shots and masks on us all (though they should have locked us down sooner and harder!).
This is why spreading the truth about these events is so vital. We must not let the lies stand. If these lies are written into the history books, then the conspirators really have won.
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