The internet, and specifically citizen-generated media has now made the flow of information impossible to control, and official narratives are being ruptured at the seams by “insider threat” whistle-blowing and fearless independent investigative journalism. Pressure has come down on career journalists to ‘parrot or perish’, and as the ABC has somewhat ironically pointed out, China has been hammering journalists who report truthfully in a way that criticises the state, by attributing hundreds of negative social credits to them, and ruining lives…

We have recently learned that Microsoft and News Guard plan to silence the voice of independent media in the run-up to the 2020 elections, but is this what we want? We have indeed fallen into a schizoid and pervasively adversarial state, due to the contradictory information being delivered to us (even by POTUS), but faith in official narratives will not survive another generation if consistency and lawfulness are not restored.

President-elect Donald Trump took 141 distinct stances on 23 major issues during his bid for the White House.

Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7 states that it is illegal to classify information that would conceal a crime, or simply embarrass an administration.

In any case, the world needs the truth, and it will have it.

Live at Chaos Computer Club | Kill lists details | SSH possibly compromised | PRISM document shows OCR and PGP still safe | Signal safe

On August 9th, Sydney beamed out strong support for Julian Assange with a live-to-air event: ‘THE GAGGING OF JULIAN ASSANGE’. The venue, with live audience, was Politics in the Pub at the Sydney Gaelic Club. Thanks goes to the #Unity4J movement and particularly its ‘Stream Team’, for their invaluable technical support.

The remote guest speakers were Julian’s mother, Christine Assange, and the President of the New Zealand Internet Party, Suzie Dawson, who spoke to the audience live from Moscow.

In Sydney, the speakers were Cathy Vogan, Professor Stuart Rees and Mike Head. Christine was interviewed two days earlier by Cathy Vogan, and this was pre-loaded to the stream. There had been ‘mysterious problems’, in getting her connected to the live monthly VIGILS that #Unity4J have been running, so no risks were taken…

Here is the entire show, as broadcast on August 9th, with a direct link to Suzie Dawson’s talk. As viewers will see from the opening remarks by Vogan, there was a power failure (and internet lockout) while Christine’s interview was playing. Dawson focuses on the #Unity4J movement to save Julian – now 2700 people strong, and comprised of artists, writers, techs and speakers. She addresses the idea of bringing together people with different political opinions, who have one common aim, and how that’s been panning out.

Big shout-out to Gard Lord, @Jarraparilla, for this list of the main points made by Christine Assange:

*** “UK extradition does not require a prima facie case… There is absolutely no proper legal process for my son. The US Grand Jury is in secret… it has no defence allowed and it has no judge…”

*** “If UK get him on the [bail] warrant, which should be defunct, they can then drop that [and] serve the Grand Jury indictment with no proper legal process. Then they can extradite Julian to the US, again without legal process because you don’t have to present a prima facie case…”

*** “And then, when he gets to USA, under the National Defence Authorisation Act, he can be detained indefinitely without trial and face the death penalty, or 45 years in jail, if we see him at all for trial. It’s horrific.”

*** “And the Australian government has done NOTHING. Julian has tried to renew his passport but the computer won’t allow him to do that, which means that the government is not allowing him to do it.”

*** Christine suggests that UK govt did not extradite Gary McKinnon or @FreeLauriLove because they were UK citizens and the groundswell of outrage would have made it harder for them to extradite her son @JulianAssange.

*** Christine believes the #Russiavape collusion narrative is designed to make it easier to charge Julian with espionage and avoid First Amendment protections. She notes how @SamAdamsAward US intel veterans have defended @JulianAssange and don’t believe Russia was @wikileaks source.

*** Christine notes a former CIA officer claiming infiltration of international state media. She says @abcnews “are the worst” & wonders if they are infiltrated. “I have had to pull them up on calling Julian a hacker. Constantly. They will not refer to him as a journalist.”

*** “Australia has to stand up. Why do we want to be a Republic? Because we want to be a sovereign nation. But if you are not going to stand up for your citizen when a big bully superpower is threatening & torturing them, then you are not a sovereign nation.”

*** “Julian is dying. He is being slowly murdered. And this is the really disgusting thing: they’ve got nothing to charge him with. Because he’s done nothing wrong.”

*** “So they have chosen deliberately not to go to court, to keep him detained, to refuse him the normal requirements of life – fresh air, exercise, sunshine, medical care – so that he will gradually die.”

*** “His doctors are saying that if he is not gotten out of there, that’s exactly what will happen: he will die. He has irreversible damage to his mind and body now. He has been in chronic pain for 2 years. And UK refuses safe passage to go to a hospital.”

*** “I could never be as brave as Julian. Most people couldn’t. But what we can do for people in his situation is stand up for them. We can stand up to our governments and say No! Evil is not going to flourish because good men are going to do something.”

“Don’t we tell our children to stand up to bullying? Well I’m asking the Australian people to stand up & say NO. We’re better than this. We’re not gonna let this happen. If you don’t have the guts to do it, Malcolm Turnbull, we’re going to make you do it.”

*** “I want to say thank you to everyone who has stood up and is standing up. It does make a difference. You mightn’t think anything is being stopped but I think it is.. It’s not only boosting @JulianAssange’s morale but also his family’s morale, for us to keep going.”

*** “My son hasn’t felt the grass on his feet for six years. His eyesight is failing because he can’t look into the distance. If this was going on in a Third World country, or Russia, they would all be screaming at the top of their lungs.”

*** “They did more for one of the worst pedophiles the world has ever seen, Peter Scully, who was raping & killing babies. The Australian govt offered Consular Support and $500K! They go & bail out people who have been CHARGED with smuggling drugs!”

*** Christine notes @wikileaks revealed Hillary’s cynical plot to overthrow Gaddafi as a prelude to her run for President. Libya’s collapse has now triggered waves of refugees. “I see a lot of people protesting… Where are they for my son? He is a political refugee!”

*** “Liberty isn’t something that we just attain. We’ve got to continually fight for it. Because there are always people trying to take it away. Never has liberty been more under threat than right now, because of the technology [that Julian helped expose].”

*** “Both Left and Right can abuse power. Within the #Unity4J movement I am working with all sorts of people. What they all have in common is support for democracy and free speech, a free press, fair legal process and human rights. We can all come together on that.”

Christine Assange speaks out for her son Julian. Sydney, August 9 2018

Assange, Pilger says, has not only been a victim of persecution from the US and other states, from which he was granted political asylum – or, a place to remain arbitrarily ‘holed-up’ for 6 years, according to two UN rulings… What troubles Pilger more is the “Vichy journalism”, of which he gives numerous examples, that has served to aggregate lies and smear that would demolish public support for Wikileaks, and deflect us from reading the content of their publications. If we would only read them now, we might be skeptical about journalists describing a war hawk as “the icon of our generation”…

Even more disturbingly, Pilger reminds us that it was two Guardian journalists, David Leigh and Luke Harding, who recklessly published the password to the trove of USG cables while Wikileaks was in the process of redacting them. That instantly gave criminals and intelligence agencies around the world, including those of repressive states, the information they needed to pursue whistleblowers and dissidents. Like Madelene Albright, they may have said: “It was worth it”, to place Wikileaks in such a terrible situation.

Pilger read statements from Assange’s family, concerning his deteriorating state of health, and from ‘Women Against Rape’, who are appalled at being manipulated by bogus claims that undermined the credibility of Assange and Wikileaks.

We have been quick to forget that Julian Assange received many international awards for “outstanding contribution to journalism”; including here in Australia, where he won a Walkley and the Sydney Peace Foundation medal. What’s fresh in our minds though, is that in the last few years, we have been spied upon and profiled; then flooded and manipulated by fake news. We know that our grass roots communications were poisoned by military-grade Information Operations.

Cambridge Analytica wasn’t “Vichy journalism”. They, and their hidden, offshore affiliates were paid by the likes of Trump and the British alt-right to “inject [damned lies] into the bloodstream of the internet”, that would terrify and divide us. And ironically, via the very platforms we had brilliantly used to make truthful information from organisations like Wikileaks ‘go viral’. That had united us like never before. What was different, and equally unprecedented in the turn-around, was that we weren’t all being delivered the same information or political offer. It varied, according to what was known about our personalities, religious affiliations, ‘likes’ and any other information we had shared, or could be obtained.

The inventor of the world-wide-web, Sir Tim Berners Lee, a CERN scientist at the time, offered a remarkable service to humanity. He gave it away for free, so that every citizen could eventually have an equal voice, and the same, unlimited access to information – and of course what Wikileaks did was very consistent with this vision. I’m not sure that Berners Lee’s immediate intention was to foster true democracy, but almost 30 years down the track, he is deeply concerned about that now. He says: ““Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?”. Noting that his dream of ‘net neutrality’ has also become a thing of the past, Berners Lee has recently called for a Magna Carta for the web.

Meanwhile, back in Australia, Bernard Keane, the political editor of ‘Crikey’, warns us in his article: ‘An Incomplete List of Evidence that Australia is becoming a Police State’, about a wide legal net that has been thrown over what we are allowed to know. He states:

“You can be prosecuted for viewing, sharing and republishing Wikileaks-style leaked governments documents unless you can prove you believed the information would not “cause harm to Australia’s interests”.

And coming soon before parliament:

“an expansion of the government’s powers to plant malware on phones and computers to undermine encryption.”

End of an era? I am stepping it up again to defend Wikileaks; and my advice, whatever you believe about its founder, is that you should too. It’s not only Assange that needs saving, but let’s not forget that he too offered humanity a remarkable, free public service. The truth of Wikileaks was solid evidence that governments lie. The truth of subsequent whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Chris Wylie was that they not only lie, but spy on us all, and employ AI professionals to tailor their lies to our individual weaknesses. We’re in deep (state) shit now. Everyone of us is in the firing line of ‘Weaponised AI Propaganda’, and our right to know is being bombarded by prohibitive legislation.

Information still wants to be free – especially when it is being hidden for the wrong reasons – and we couldn’t be in more need than now, of that ‘herd inoculation’ Wikileaks provided against disinformation. Let’s encourage each other to get a booster shot, by sharing John Pilger’s important message.

Vogan mentioned that SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica is fondly known as “MI6 for Hire”. They have specialised in British government and military information operations for over 25 years, and until recently, mostly on other countries. She referred us to research into their filial’s assignment in Trinidad. It was clear that PRISM-level access had been given to Cambridge Analytica for the creation of a national police database, and ironic in retrospect that this shady outfit was scoring every citizen on their propensity to commit a crime.

We have since learned that for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s reformer campaign, SCL created “a psychological road map of the kingdom’s citizenry and its sentiment toward the royal family”. That’s what the spooks associated with Team Trump & ALL the Brexit Leave campaigns do, and by their own admission, under a variety of shell company names. “We ghost in and ghost out”, they say, “without anyone knowing we were ever there”.

This sounds very much like the work Palantir Technologies does. In her 2014 article on Palantir, ‘The Philosopher’s Stoned’, Vogan reports their stated activity is tracking digital footprints in order to predict future behaviour; a somewhat similar brand of ‘Big Brother Meets Big Data / Pre-Crime’ fiction. ‘But it sells!”, she proclaims, and proceeds to tell us their story. Palantir was founded by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the “eccentric philosopher” Alex Karp. Their locale, from where they claim to have hunted down Bin Laden, is a replica of The Shire. Their mentor and client is the CIA. Cambridge Analytica have worked for the Pentagon.

A part of Palantir’s story was their involvement with HBGary Federal, a smaller agency that had allegedly been contracted, a few months after Cablegate, to destroy the reputation of Wikileaks and its supporters. The plan was also to ruin the career of the Guardian journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who had been writing favourable copy about Wikileaks; and who would go on to win a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the Snowden revelations.

A document leaked by Anonymous from HBGary’s mail server stated:

“Together, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies bring the expertise and approach needed to combat the WikiLeaks threat effectively.”

Palantir vs Wikileaks. The mission was to bring down the organisation.
Peter Thiel's other company, Paypal, blockaded Wikileaks funding world-wide.

Wired magazine reports back in February 2011, in an exciting account of the doxing of HBGary Federal by Anonymous, the intentions of their analyst, Aaron Barr, in collecting citizen data:

“I will sell it”

Writing for Wired, Nate Anderson from Ars Technica explains:

Barr had been interested in social media for quite some time, believing that the links it showed between people had enormous value when it came to mapping networks of hackers—and when hackers wanted to target their victims. He presented a talk to a closed Department of Justice conference earlier this year on “specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success” through social media.

Barr’s claims of “laser focus” were bogus. The reason he got hacked was that he published a long list of names on cryptome.org (no to the actual link), of people he claimed were members of Anonymous, but the list included a lot of people who were not hackers. They were journalists, artists, musicians and writers, such as Nozomi Hayase, so the actual Anonymous got pretty angry… It came as a total surprise that the plot to destroy Wikileaks and harm both its supporters and a sympathetic journalist was buried in the mix. That was the scoop however that signalled the war on people-power had begun.

Nate Anderson continues:

“[Aaron Barr's] curiosity about teasing out the webs of connections between people grew. By scraping sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, Barr believed he could draw strong conclusions, such as determining which town someone lived in even if they didn’t provide that information. How? By looking at their friends.”

Does this sound familiar? Hardly surprising, when we learn of Palantir Technologies’ involvement in the Trump campaign, alongside Cambridge Analytica. There was even a third agency called Quid, but what of Wikileaks? Is it likely they would be playing ball with Palantir, and its co-founder Peter Thiel? He is also the founder of Paypal, who staged the world-wide blockade of Wikileaks funding. It’s hard to imagine. Slavoj Žižek aptly signals how at odds their agendas are:

“Assange characterised himself as the spy of and for the people: he is not spying on the people for those in power, he is spying on those in power for the people”.

Peter Thiel is also a board-member of Facebook, and was the site’s first major investor. He has harvested a mountain of citizen data, via Paypal and Palantir at least. It was an emissary from Palantir, Sophie Schmidt, daughter of the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who persuaded SCL that there was a lot of lucre to be made in analytics and election services. They formed SCL Elections. It was Steve Bannon who suggested they change the name to Cambridge Analytica.

Žižek offers an interesting perspective on the strict and prolonged silencing of Julian Assange. If his hunch is correct, Assange’s last significant announcement may have been that he would testify to the UK Parliament about Cambridge Analytica. Žižek writes:

“I think one name explains it all: Cambridge Analytica – a name which stands for all Assange is about, for what he fights against; the disclosure of the link between the great private corporations and government agencies…

Žižek continues:
“Remember what a big topic and obsession the Russian meddling in the US elections was – now we know it was not Russian hackers (with Assange) who nudged the people towards Trump, but instead the West’s own data-processing agencies which joined forces with political forces. This doesn’t mean that Russia and its allies are innocent: they probably did try to influence the outcome in the same way that the US does in other countries (only in this case, it is labeled “democracy promotion”). But it means the big bad wolf who distorts our democracy is not in the Kremlin, but walking around the West itself – and this is what Assange was claiming all along.”

As the Cambridge Analytica investigation unravels, it would seem that the Deep State has backed the wrong horse again in the Spooks vs Wikileaks stakes; even if Assange has been nobbled. The Favourite (of the CIA) promised supremacy over enlightened people-power, but such are the ways of the Palantiri Stone(r)s. The “cognitive military complex”, as Žižek calls it, has taken a blow to the pre-frontal from Wylie’s smoking guns. Public trust sinks as low as Facebook shares. Thinking back, we have reason to predict that Assange has more to say… Certainly Wikileaks has more to say, and we need to keep hearing it.

What we already know is that the hedge-fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, is the common factor between Cambridge Analytica, Trump, Bannon, AggregateIQ (his main analytics company for Brexit) and… Siri, for whom his algorithms were used. Siri, who knows our name and is always listening… We also know that Peter Thiel is the common factor between Cambridge Analytica, the CIA groomed Palantir Technologies and last but not least, Facebook.

Meanwhile, still in the red corner according to the hawks, is the Wikileaks-Russian tag team. Over there! Over there! Didn’t Zuckerberg do a sterling job of upgrading Russia’s interference in the US Elections during his testimony to Congress? One imagines “Arms Race” is exactly what both Parties wanted to hear.

Good boy. We know you’re sorry…

Žižek is troubled by what he calls “a well orchestrated character assassination” of the Wikileaks editor-in-chief, and cites gutter-level rumours that he is too smelly for the Ecuadorian Embassy. Žižek also refers to “a disgusting attack” on Assange from the Guardian – in the midst of extensive Cambridge Analytica coverage – which described him as a megalomaniac and a fugitive from justice. Žižek once again jogs our memory, and helps us join the dots:

“…as far they [the journalists] are concerned, write as much as you want about Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon, just don’t dwell on what Assange was drawing our attention to: that the state apparatuses which are now expected to investigate the “scandal” are themselves part of the problem.”

With news emerging that Theresa May was working with SCL as recently as February 2018, Slavoj Žižek may have a point; mighty heads could roll. Or, we could be rolled… back into the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

Cathy Vogan, on the black and white polarity of ‘Spooks vs Wikileaks’, and which future we need for the 21st Century:

Knightscope's crime-fighting robot already deployed in San Francisco to deter the homeless from forming tent cities.

After a 20-year hiatus, Australia’s most notorious populist Far Right politician has risen to power again. Pauline Hanson came out of the woodwork in 2016 to run for the Australian Senate, and win 6 seats for the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party.

One Nation has been accused of “xenophobia”, homophobia, climate denial and contempt for Aboriginals, welfare recipients and trade unionists. Hanson’s career began in the mid 1990s, when she asserted that Australia was being overrun by Asians. Today, it’s Muslims, and Senator Hanson’s call for a halt to Muslim immigration has fuelled Islamophobic sentiment around the country, and divided the nation.

‘ We’re coming after you and your jobs’

Pauline has recently declared: ‘”We’re coming after you and your jobs” to the current political leaders of her home-state Queensland, where she has garnered her strongest support to date. The One Nation leader has rallied an army of 36 candidates for the 2017 state election. Given that over half a million Australians voted One Nation in to the Senate at the 2016 Federal election, both of mainstream parties have good reason to quiver in their boots…

Pauline Hanson - she's coming to get you...

Extract

“I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 – the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying. The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion…”

Read more

Filmed by Cathy Vogan at Sydney University on Tuesday March 22, 2016. Co-hosted by Sydney University Resistance Club, the Centre of Peace And Conflict Studies and Green Left Weekly.

Hey folks, I’m fundraising to go to our most critical climate conference ever, COP21, with a troupe of visionary Australian artists called THE CLIMATE ANGELS. My purposes is to make a documentary about climate change, and take part in onsite creative projects that will engage the media. I believe that strong voices and imagery will incite the world to read about the science… COP21 is happening in Paris (my home-town for 16 years) from Nov 30 to Dec 11 2015. 12 days only, to save the planet… Please help.