FTR #1077 Surveillance Valley, Part 3: Cambridge Analytica, Democracy and Counterinsurgency

Con­tin­u­ing the dis­cus­sion from FTR #1076, the broad­cast recaps key aspects of analy­sis of the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca scan­dal.

In our last pro­gram, we not­ed that both the inter­net (DARPA projects includ­ing Project Agile) and the Ger­man Nazi Par­ty had their ori­gins as coun­terin­sur­gency gam­bits. Not­ing Hitler’s speech before The Indus­try Club of Dus­sel­dorf, in which he equat­ed com­mu­nism with democ­ra­cy, we high­light how the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca scan­dal reflects the coun­terin­sur­gency ori­gins of the Inter­net, and how the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca affair embod­ies anti-Democ­ra­cy/as coun­terin­sur­gency.

Key aspects of the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca affair include:

1.–The use of psy­cho­graph­ic per­son­al­i­ty test­ing on Face­book that is used for polit­i­cal advan­tage: ” . . . . For sev­er­al years, a data firm even­tu­al­ly hired by the Trump cam­paign, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, has been using Face­book as a tool to build psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files that rep­re­sent some 230 mil­lion adult Amer­i­cans. A spin­off of a British con­sult­ing com­pa­ny and some­time-defense con­trac­tor known for its coun­tert­er­ror­ism ‘psy ops’ work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seed­ing the social net­work with per­son­al­i­ty quizzes. Respon­dents — by now hun­dreds of thou­sands of us, most­ly female and most­ly young but enough male and old­er for the firm to make infer­ences about oth­ers with sim­i­lar behav­iors and demo­graph­ics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Face­book, gains access to their pro­files and real names. . . .”
2.–The par­ent com­pa­ny of Cam­bridge Analytica–SCL–was deeply involved with coun­tert­er­ror­ism “psy-ops” in Afghanistan, embody­ing the essence of the coun­terin­sur­gency dynam­ic at the root of the devel­op­ment of the Inter­net. The use of online data to sub­vert democ­ra­cy recalls Hitler’s speech to the Indus­try Club of Dus­sel­dorf, in which he equat­ed democ­ra­cy with com­mu­nism: ” . . . . Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca was a com­pa­ny spun out of SCL Group, a British mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that worked in infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions for armed forces around the world. It was con­duct­ing research on how to scale and digi­tise infor­ma­tion war­fare – the use of infor­ma­tion to con­fuse or degrade the effi­ca­cy of an ene­my. . . . As direc­tor of research, Wylie’s orig­i­nal role was to map out how the com­pa­ny would take tra­di­tion­al infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions tac­tics into the online space – in par­tic­u­lar, by pro­fil­ing peo­ple who would be sus­cep­ti­ble to cer­tain mes­sag­ing. This mor­phed into the polit­i­cal are­na. After Wylie left, the com­pa­ny worked on Don­ald Trump’s US pres­i­den­tial cam­paign . . . .”
3.–Cambridge Ana­lyt­i­ca whistle­blow­er Christo­pher Wylie’s obser­va­tions on the anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic nature of the fir­m’s work: ” . . . . It was this shift from the bat­tle­field to pol­i­tics that made Wylie uncom­fort­able. ‘When you are work­ing in infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions projects, where your tar­get is a com­bat­ant, the auton­o­my or agency of your tar­gets is not your pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion. It is fair game to deny and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion, coerce and exploit any men­tal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties a per­son has, and to bring out the very worst char­ac­ter­is­tics in that per­son because they are an ene­my,’ he says. ‘But if you port that over to a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem, if you run cam­paigns designed to under­mine people’s abil­i­ty to make free choic­es and to under­stand what is real and not real, you are under­min­ing democ­ra­cy and treat­ing vot­ers in the same way as you are treat­ing ter­ror­ists.’ . . . .”
4.–Wylie’s obser­va­tions on how Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s method­ol­o­gy can be used to build a fas­cist polit­i­cal move­ment: ” . . . . One of the rea­sons these tech­niques are so insid­i­ous is that being a tar­get of a dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign is ‘usu­al­ly a plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence’, because you are being fed con­tent with which you are like­ly to agree. ‘You are being guid­ed through some­thing that you want to be true,’ Wylie says. To build an insur­gency, he explains, you first tar­get peo­ple who are more prone to hav­ing errat­ic traits, para­noia or con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing, and get them to ‘like’ a group on social media. They start engag­ing with the con­tent, which may or may not be true; either way ‘it feels good to see that infor­ma­tion’. When the group reach­es 1,000 or 2,000 mem­bers, an event is set up in the local area. Even if only 5% show up, ‘that’s 50 to 100 peo­ple flood­ing a local cof­fee shop’, Wylie says. This, he adds, val­i­dates their opin­ion because oth­er peo­ple there are also talk­ing about ‘all these things that you’ve been see­ing online in the depths of your den and get­ting angry about’. Peo­ple then start to believe the rea­son it’s not shown on main­stream news chan­nels is because ‘they don’t want you to know what the truth is’. As Wylie sums it up: ‘What start­ed out as a fan­ta­sy online gets port­ed into the tem­po­ral world and becomes real to you because you see all these peo­ple around you.’ . . . .”
5.–Wylie’s obser­va­tion that Face­book was “All In” on the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca machi­na­tions: ” . . . . ‘Face­book has known about what Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca was up to from the very begin­ning of those projects,” Wylie claims. “They were noti­fied, they autho­rised the appli­ca­tions, they were giv­en the terms and con­di­tions of the app that said explic­it­ly what it was doing. They hired peo­ple who worked on build­ing the app. I had legal cor­re­spon­dence with their lawyers where they acknowl­edged it hap­pened as far back as 2016.’ . . . .”
6.–The deci­sive par­tic­i­pa­tion of “Spy Tech” firm Palan­tir in the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca oper­a­tion: Peter Thiel’s sur­veil­lance firm Palan­tir was appar­ent­ly deeply involved with Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s gam­ing of per­son­al data har­vest­ed from Face­book in order to engi­neer an elec­toral vic­to­ry for Trump. Thiel was an ear­ly investor in Face­book, at one point was its largest share­hold­er and is still one of its largest share­hold­ers. In addi­tion to his oppo­si­tion to democ­ra­cy because it alleged­ly is inim­i­cal to wealth cre­ation, Thiel does­n’t think women should be allowed to vote and holds Nazi legal the­o­reti­cian Carl Schmitt in high regard. ” . . . . It was a Palan­tir employ­ee in Lon­don, work­ing close­ly with the data sci­en­tists build­ing Cambridge’s psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­fil­ing tech­nol­o­gy, who sug­gest­ed the sci­en­tists cre­ate their own app — a mobile-phone-based per­son­al­i­ty quiz — to gain access to Face­book users’ friend net­works, accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained by The New York Times. The rev­e­la­tions pulled Palan­tir — co-found­ed by the wealthy lib­er­tar­i­an Peter Thiel — into the furor sur­round­ing Cam­bridge, which improp­er­ly obtained Face­book data to build ana­lyt­i­cal tools it deployed on behalf of Don­ald J. Trump and oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­dates in 2016. Mr. Thiel, a sup­port­er of Pres­i­dent Trump, serves on the board at Face­book. ‘There were senior Palan­tir employ­ees that were also work­ing on the Face­book data,’ said Christo­pher Wylie, a data expert and Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca co-founder, in tes­ti­mo­ny before British law­mak­ers on Tues­day. . . . The con­nec­tions between Palan­tir and Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca were thrust into the spot­light by Mr. Wylie’s tes­ti­mo­ny on Tues­day. Both com­pa­nies are linked to tech-dri­ven bil­lion­aires who backed Mr. Trump’s cam­paign: Cam­bridge is chiefly owned by Robert Mer­cer, the com­put­er sci­en­tist and hedge fund mag­nate, while Palan­tir was co-found­ed in 2003 by Mr. Thiel, who was an ini­tial investor in Face­book. . . .”
7.–The use of “dark posts” by the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca team. (We have not­ed that Brad Parscale has reassem­bled the old Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca team for Trump’s 2020 elec­tion cam­paign. It seems prob­a­ble that AOC’s mil­lions of online fol­low­ers, as well as the “Bernie Bots,” will be get­ting “dark posts” craft­ed by AI’s scan­ning their online efforts.) ” . . . . One recent adver­tis­ing prod­uct on Face­book is the so-called ‘dark post’: A news­feed mes­sage seen by no one aside from the users being tar­get­ed. With the help of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, Mr. Trump’s dig­i­tal team used dark posts to serve dif­fer­ent ads to dif­fer­ent poten­tial vot­ers, aim­ing to push the exact right but­tons for the exact right peo­ple at the exact right times. . . .”

Sup­ple­ment­ing the dis­cus­sion about Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, the pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion from FTR #718 about Face­book’s appar­ent involve­ment with ele­ments and indi­vid­u­als linked to CIA and DARPA: ” . . . . Face­book’s most recent round of fund­ing was led by a com­pa­ny called Grey­lock Ven­ture Cap­i­tal, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Grey­lock­’s senior part­ners is called Howard Cox, anoth­er for­mer chair­man of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their web­site), this is the ven­ture-cap­i­tal wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty became so excit­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of new tech­nol­o­gy and the inno­va­tions being made in the pri­vate sec­tor, that in 1999 they set up their own ven­ture cap­i­tal fund, In-Q-Tel, which ‘iden­ti­fies and part­ners with com­pa­nies devel­op­ing cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies to help deliv­er these solu­tions to the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and the broad­er US Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty (IC) to fur­ther their mis­sions’. . . .”

More about the CIA/DARPA links to the devel­op­ment of Face­book: ” . . . . The sec­ond round of fund­ing into Face­book ($US12.7 mil­lion) came from ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Accel Part­ners. Its man­ag­er James Brey­er was for­mer­ly chair­man of the Nation­al Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Asso­ci­a­tion, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a ven­ture cap­i­tal firm estab­lished by the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency in 1999. One of the com­pa­ny’s key areas of exper­tise are in ‘data min­ing tech­nolo­gies’. Brey­er also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Tech­nolo­gies, which was one of those com­pa­nies respon­si­ble for the rise of the inter­net. Dr Ani­ta Jones joined the firm, which includ­ed Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been direc­tor of Defence Research and Engi­neer­ing for the US Depart­ment of Defence. She was also an advis­er to the Sec­re­tary of Defence and over­see­ing the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is respon­si­ble for high-tech, high-end devel­op­ment. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of Face­book’s plans to use brain-to-com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy to oper­ate its plat­form, there­by the enabling of record­ing and data­bas­ing peo­ple’s thoughts; Review of Face­book’s employ­ment of for­mer DARPA head Regi­na Dugan to imple­ment the brain-to-com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy; Review of Face­book’s build­ing 8–designed to dupli­cate DARPA; Review of Face­book’s hir­ing of the Atlantic Coun­cil to police the social medi­um’s online con­tent; Review of Face­book’s part­ner­ing with Naren­dra Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cist gov­ern­ment in India; Review of Face­book’s emloy­ment of Ukrain­ian fas­cist Katery­na Kruk to man­age the social medi­um’s Ukrain­ian con­tent.

FTR #1121 More than One “Flu” Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Part 2

Oya­Gen, Inc. has used a drug devel­oped, test­ed and FDA-approved that suc­cess­ful­ly treats and–apparently–cures Covid-19. Inter­est­ing­ly and, per­haps, sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the tri­als were con­duct­ed at Fort Det­rick. As seen in FTR #‘s 1119 and 1120, the mil­i­tary has been heav­i­ly involved in research­ing virus­es of this type.

There con­tin­ues to be enor­mous empha­sis on Gilead Sci­ences by hedge funds includ­ing Renais­sance Tech­nolo­gies. Robert Mer­cer stepped down as CEO of the firm at the end of 2017, as pub­lic­i­ty around Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and the fall­out from the Char­lottesville march made him some­thing of a PR lia­bil­i­ty. Usu­al­ly in such sit­u­a­tions, peo­ple like Mer­cer remain as key investors.

In FTR #1118, we not­ed that the Board of Direc­tors of the firm is “inter­est­ing.” The “dis­ap­point­ing” per­for­mance of Gilead Sci­ences changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly with the Covid-19 out­break. ” . . . . Until Mon­day, when it fell in a bru­tal mar­ket rout, Gilead’s stock price had defied the over­all mar­ket decline of recent weeks, ris­ing almost 20 per­cent from Feb. 21 to March 6, on hopes that the drug could pro­vide the first treat­ment for covid-19. The lack of treat­ment helps explain why. The stock price increased 5 per­cent on Feb. 24 alone when a top offi­cial of the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion pinned much of the world’s hopes for a treat­ment on the drug. . . .”

Again, in FTR #‘s 1119 and 1120 we looked at the pro­found involve­ment of the Pen­ta­gon in research­ing coro­n­avirus­es like Covid-19, as well as DARPA’s deep involve­ment with com­pa­nies approved to begin work­ing on vac­cines. Now, Med­ica­go, anoth­er DARPA-fund­ed com­pa­ny, claims to have a vac­cine ready for tri­al. “. . . . Using plants and genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered agrobac­te­ria works faster than eggs also makes the vac­cine much eas­i­er to pro­duce at scale, which, in part, is why the U.S. mil­i­tary has invest­ed in the com­pa­ny. In 2010, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, put togeth­er a $100 mil­lion pro­gram dubbed Blue Angel to look into new forms of vac­cine dis­cov­ery and pro­duc­tion. A big chunk of that mon­ey went to Med­ica­go to build a facil­i­ty in North Car­oli­na, where they showed that they could find a vac­cine in just 20 days, then rapid­ly scale up pro­duc­tion. . . .”

Next, we turn to an arti­cle not­ing that the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the COVID-19 dis­ease has remark­able over­lap with a hypo­thet­i­cal dis­ease, dubbed “Dis­ease X.” In 2018, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion empha­sized an alarm­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of “hypo­thet­i­cal” “Dis­ease X” that appears to be shared with SARS-CoV­‑2: the abil­i­ty to rapid­ly morph from a mild to dead­ly dis­ease. The sud­den turn towards a dead­ly dis­ease appears to be due, in part, to an over­ly aggres­sive immune response that ends up rav­aging the lungs. As one expert points out, this is the same pat­tern seen in the 1918 “Span­ish flu” pan­dem­ic.

In FTR #1117, we reviewed the fact that mil­i­tary researchers had suc­cess­ful­ly recov­ered DNA from that infa­mous 1918 flu virus. as will be seen below, that virus was re-cre­at­ed in a lab­o­ra­to­ry in 2005.

So the WHO warned a cou­ple years ago about a hypo­thet­i­cal “Dis­ease X” dis­ease that was high­ly con­ta­gious with the abil­i­ty to spread with asymp­to­mati­cal­ly, is mild in most cas­es but with the abil­i­ty to sud­den­ly turn dead­ly. And here we are two years lat­er with a dis­ease that fits that pro­file. It was a pret­ty pre­scient pre­dic­tion.

Note, also, that Mar­i­on Koopmans–head of viro­science at Eras­mus Med­ical Cen­ter in Rot­ter­dam and one of the WHO per­son­nel who opined that Covid-19 was “Dis­ease X” worked at the same insti­tu­tion as the researchers who per­formed gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments on the HN51 Avian Bird Flu virus, adapt­ing to fer­rets and mak­ing it com­mu­ni­ca­ble through casu­al res­pi­ra­to­ry activ­i­ty. Those GOF experiements were also dis­cussed in FTR #1117.

” . . . . From recent reports about the stealthy ways the so-called Covid-19 virus spreads and maims, a pic­ture is emerg­ing of an enig­mat­ic pathogen whose effects are main­ly mild, but which occa­sion­al­ly — and unpre­dictably — turns dead­ly in the sec­ond week. . . . The doc­tor [Li Wen­liang], who was in good health pri­or to his infec­tion, appeared to have a rel­a­tive­ly mild case until his lungs became inflamed, lead­ing to the man’s death two days lat­er, said Lin­fa Wang, who heads the emerg­ing infec­tious dis­ease pro­gram at Duke-Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore Med­ical School. A sim­i­lar pat­tern of inflam­ma­tion not­ed among Covid-19 patients was observed in those who suc­cumbed to the 1918 ‘Span­ish flu’ pan­dem­ic . . .”

We won­der if vari­ants of the Covid-19 may have been mod­i­fied to infect the upper res­pi­ra­to­ry tract and/or mod­i­fied with DNA from the res­ur­rect­ed 1918 “Span­ish Flu”?

Peter Daszak of the WHO once again, voiced the (self-ful­fill­ing?) opinion/prophecy that Covid-19 is indeed “Dis­ease X.”

A key fac­tor spurring our sus­pi­cion con­cern­ing genet­ic-engi­neer­ing of one or more vari­ant of the Covid-19 virus con­cerns a 2015 Gain-of-Func­tion exper­i­ment: “Ralph Bar­ic, an infec­tious-dis­ease researcher at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, last week (Novem­ber 9) pub­lished a study on his team’s efforts to engi­neer a virus with the sur­face pro­tein of the SHC014 coro­n­avirus, found in horse­shoe bats in Chi­na, and the back­bone of one that caus­es human-like severe acute res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­drome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human air­way cells and caused dis­ease in mice. . . . The results demon­strate the abil­i­ty of the SHC014 sur­face pro­tein to bind and infect human cells, val­i­dat­ing con­cerns that this virus—or oth­er coro­n­avirus­es found in bat species—may be capa­ble of mak­ing the leap to peo­ple with­out first evolv­ing in an inter­me­di­ate host, Nature report­ed. They also reignite a debate about whether that infor­ma­tion jus­ti­fies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-func­tion research. ‘If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could pre­dict the tra­jec­to­ry,’ Simon Wain-Hob­son, a virol­o­gist at the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris, told Nature. . . .”

The above-men­tioned Ralph Baric–who did the gain-of-func­tion mod­i­fi­ca­tion on the Horse­shoe Bat coro­n­avirus, has been select­ed to engi­neer the Covid-19.

Note what might be termed a “viro­log­ic Juras­sic Park” man­i­fes­ta­tion: ” . . . . . . . . The tech­nol­o­gy imme­di­ate­ly cre­at­ed bio-weapon wor­ries. . . . Researchers at the US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) drove that point home in 2005 when they res­ur­rect­ed the influen­za virus that killed tens of mil­lions in 1918–1919. . . .”

FTR #1111 and FTR #1112 Update on the Alleged “Suicide” of Iris Chang and the Destabilization of China and “BioWarfare-Psy-Op” Against China?

This descrip­tion encom­pass­es mate­r­i­al for two pro­grams. Fol­low­ing up on FTR #‘s 1107 and 1108, we high­light a San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle arti­cle about the alleged sui­cide of Iris Chang, a sug­ges­tive, impor­tant detail was noticed by a sharp-eyed listener/reader. A detail about the phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Iris’s “sui­cide” suggests–strongly–that she did not pull the trig­ger her­self. Her body was dis­cov­ered by a San­ta Clara Coun­ty Water Dis­trict Employ­ee. Some­one who had fired a .45 cal­iber black pow­der weapon into her mouth would be unlike­ly to have her hands crossed in her lap and with the revolver on her left leg. This sounds like it may well an arranged crime scene. “. . . . He noticed con­den­sa­tion on the win­dows, peered inside and saw Iris in the dri­ver’s seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. . . .” Some­one who had fired a.45 cal­iber black pow­der weapon­in­to her mouth would be unlike­ly to have her hands crossed in her lap and with the revolver on her left leg. This sounds like it may well an arranged crime scene.

Tran­si­tion­ing to dis­cus­sion about bio­log­i­cal war­fare, we dis­cuss Unit 731–a Japan­ese chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal war­fare unit that com­mit­ted egre­gious atroc­i­ties in Chi­na dur­ing World War II.  We note: ” . . . . the U.S. Gov­ern­ment secret­ly absorbed Unit 731, mov­ing most of its sci­en­tists, per­son­nel, and doc­u­ments to U.S. mil­i­tary research cen­ters like Fort Diet­rick in the Mary­land coun­try­side. All infor­ma­tion about its activ­i­ties, includ­ing bio­log­i­cal war­fare atroc­i­ties, and hor­rif­ic exper­i­ments on ful­ly con­scious vic­tims, was with­held by Wash­ing­ton from the Amer­i­can and Japan­ese pub­lic, and from the Tokyo War Crimes Tri­bunals. All Unit 731’s records held by the U.S. Gov­ern­ment are still top secret. . . .”

In con­nec­tion with the coro­n­avirus, we note that U.S. sci­en­tists had syn­the­sized a virus of that type in a lab­o­ra­to­ry by 2008–an virus that infect­ed mice, as well as human tis­sues. The syn­thet­ic coro­n­avirus was described, in part, as fol­lows: ” . . . .  Here, we report the design, syn­the­sis, and recov­ery of the largest syn­thet­ic repli­cat­ing life form, a 29.7‑kb bat severe acute res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­drome (SARS)-like coro­n­avirus (Bat-SCoV), a like­ly prog­en­i­tor to the SARS-CoV epi­dem­ic. Syn­thet­ic recom­bi­nant bat SARS-like coro­n­avirus is infec­tious in cul­tured cells and in mice. . . .”

Alto­geth­er curi­ous in the con­text of the stri­dent­ly alarmist cov­er­age of the coro­n­avirus out­break is the fact that Thai doc­tors have appar­ent­ly suc­cess­ful­ly treat­ed the virus with a drug cock­tail involv­ing some com­mon anti-virals. “. . . . A Chi­nese woman infect­ed with the new coro­n­avirus showed a dra­mat­ic improve­ment after she was treat­ed with a cock­tail of anti-virals used to treat flu and HIV, Thai­land’s health min­istry said Sun­day. The 71-year-old patient test­ed neg­a­tive for the virus 48 hours after Thai doc­tors admin­is­tered the com­bi­na­tion, doc­tor Kriengsak Atti­porn­wanich said dur­ing the min­istry’s dai­ly press brief­ing. ‘The lab result of pos­i­tive on the coro­n­avirus turned neg­a­tive in 48 hours,’ Kriengsak said. . . . The doc­tors com­bined the anti-flu drug oseltamivir with lopinavir and riton­avir, anti-virals used to treat HIV, Kriengsak said, adding the min­istry was await­ing research results to prove the find­ings. . . .”

Report­ed by both Agence France Presse and Reuters–two major wire services–this (appar­ent­ly suc­cess­ful) ther­a­peu­tic regime has gone unre­port­ed in U.S. media, so far.

The lift­ing of a mora­to­ri­um on the test­ing of virus­es such as the SARS and MERS coro­n­avirus­es was lift­ed at the end of Decem­ber of 2017, a lit­tle more than two years before the out­break occurred. A num­ber of key points of inquiry in a post by Dr. Joseph Mer­co­la should be scru­ti­nized:

1.–As men­tioned the mora­to­ri­um on the test­ing of this virus was lift­ed a lit­tle less than two years after the out­break. ” . . . . For starters, a 2014 NPR article32 was rather prophet­ic. It dis­cuss­es the Octo­ber 2014 U.S. mora­to­ri­um on exper­i­ments on coro­n­avirus­es like SARS and MERS, as well as influen­za virus, that might make the virus­es more path­o­gen­ic and/or easy to spread among humans. The ban came on the heels of ‘high-pro­file lab mishaps’ at the CDC and ‘extreme­ly con­tro­ver­sial flu exper­i­ments’ in which the bird flu virus was engi­neered to become more lethal and con­ta­gious between fer­rets. The goal was to see if it could mutate and become more lethal and con­ta­gious between humans, caus­ing future pan­demics. . . . ”
2.–Note that as the ban was lift­ed, it was known that a virus of the type now infect­ing Chi­na had been devel­oped in a U.S. lab. This appears to be the same virus men­tioned in the 2008 post men­tioned above. That link had been tem­porar­i­ly bro­ken, as men­tioned in FTR #1112. It has since been restored. ” . . . . The fed­er­al mora­to­ri­um on lethal virus exper­i­ments in the U.S. was lift­ed at the end of Decem­ber 2017,38 even though researchers announced in 2015 they had cre­at­ed a lab-cre­at­ed hybrid coro­n­avirus sim­i­lar to that of SARS that was capa­ble of infect­ing both human air­way cells and mice. . . .”
3.–China had opened a lev­el 4 lab­o­ra­to­ry to study the world’s most dan­ger­ous pathogens in Jan­u­ary of 2018 (one month after the U.S. resumed test­ing of lethal virus­es.) ” . . . . In Jan­u­ary 2018, Chi­na’s first max­i­mum secu­ri­ty virol­o­gy lab­o­ra­to­ry (biose­cu­ri­ty lev­el 4) designed for the study of the world’s most dan­ger­ous pathogens opened its doors — in Wuhan.41,42 . . . .”
4.–A cou­ple of months before the out­break in Chi­na, there was a (frankly sus­pi­cious) exer­cise in New York that was not only a har­bin­ger of what was about to hap­pen but may have been used to jour­nal­is­ti­cal­ly frame cov­er­age of the Wuhan virus. The sig­nif­i­cance of this, in our opin­ion, is the “psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare” component–the utter hys­te­ria grip­ping the world (and dri­ving down mar­kets) may be dri­ven, in part, by the sug­ges­tion placed in peo­ple’s minds by this exer­cise. Giv­en that rough­ly nine hun­dred Chi­nese have suc­cumbed to the coro­n­avirus and almost ten times that num­ber have died from the flu in the U.S. (a coun­try with a pop­u­la­tion rough­ly one fifth the size of Chi­na’s) it would make more sense for peo­ple to be beside them­selves over the flu and/or the prospects of trav­el­ing to, or receiv­ing trav­el­ers from, the U.S. that is not the case. We also note, in this con­text, that the demo­graph­ic of peo­ple suc­cumb­ing to the coro­n­avirus is sim­i­lar to the demo­graph­ic of most flu fatal­i­ties: old­er peo­ple with oth­er infec­tions and/or chron­i­cal­ly ill patients. In oth­er words, peo­ple with weak­ened immune sys­tems. ” . . . . Equal­ly curi­ous is the fact that Johns Hop­kins Cen­ter for Health Secu­ri­ty, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum and the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion spon­sored a nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness exer­cise Octo­ber 18, 2019, in New York called ‘Event 201.’46 The sim­u­la­tion pre­dict­ed a glob­al death toll of 65 mil­lion peo­ple with­in a span of 18 months.47 As report­ed by Forbes Decem­ber 12, 2019:48 ‘The experts ran through a care­ful­ly designed, detailed sim­u­la­tion of a new (fic­tion­al) viral ill­ness called CAPS or coro­n­avirus acute pul­monary syn­drome. This was mod­eled after pre­vi­ous epi­demics like SARS and MERS.’ Sounds exact­ly like NCIP, does­n’t it? Yet the new coro­n­avirus respon­si­ble for NCIP had not yet been iden­ti­fied at the time of the sim­u­la­tion, and the first case was­n’t report­ed until two months lat­er. . . . ”
5.–As not­ed above, press cov­er­age of the Chi­nese out­break sug­gests that media out­lets may well have been briefed about “Event 201.” ” . . . . Forbes also refers to the fic­tion­al pan­dem­ic as “Dis­ease X” — the same des­ig­na­tion used by The Tele­graph in its Jan­u­ary 24, 2020, video report, “Could This Coro­n­avirus be Dis­ease X?“49 which sug­gests that media out­lets were briefed and there was coor­di­na­tion ahead of time with regard to use of cer­tain key­words and catch­phras­es in news reports and opin­ion arti­cles. . . .”
6.–Also of sig­nif­i­cance is the fact that Johns Hopkins–the co-spon­sor of “Event 201,” is at the epi­cen­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty relat­ed bio­med­ical research. FOIA requests on such infor­ma­tion are shield­ed: ” . . . . Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty (JHU) is the biggest recip­i­ent of research grants from fed­er­al agen­cies, includ­ing the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and Depart­ment of Defense and has received mil­lions of dol­lars in research grants from the Gates Foundation.50 In 2016, Johns Hop­kins spent more than $2 bil­lion on research projects, lead­ing all U.S. uni­ver­si­ties in research spend­ing for the 38th year in a row.51 If research fund­ed by fed­er­al agen­cies, such as the DOD or HHS is clas­si­fied as being per­formed ‘in the inter­est of nation­al secu­ri­ty,’ it is exempt from Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act (FOIA) requests.52 Research con­duct­ed under the Bio­med­ical Advanced Research and Devel­op­ment Author­i­ty (BARDA) is com­plete­ly shield­ed from FOIA requests by the public.53 Addi­tion­al­ly, agen­cies may deny FOIA requests and with­hold infor­ma­tion if gov­ern­ment offi­cials con­clude that shield­ing it from pub­lic view ‘pro­tects trade secrets and com­mer­cial or finan­cial infor­ma­tion which could harm the com­pet­i­tive pos­ture or busi­ness inter­ests of a com­pa­ny.’ . . .”

Next, we note that Steve Bannon–at the epi­cen­ter of the anti-Chi­na movement–is pro­fes­sion­al­ly aligned with an exiled Chi­nese bil­lion­aire and a wealthy Texas hedge fund man­ag­er posi­tioned to make a great deal of mon­ey from a down­turn in Chi­na’s mar­kets.

Ban­non is also very close to the accom­plished investor bil­lion­aire Robert Mer­cer, of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca fame. In our next pro­gram, we will dis­cuss Mer­cer’s Reinais­sance Tech­nolo­gies hedge fund and its invest­ment posi­tion with regard to a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal giant that may prof­it from the coro­n­avirus out­break.

Key points of analy­sis:

1.–G News is dis­sem­i­nat­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion about the coro­n­avirus:  ” . . . . On Jan. 25, G News pub­lished a false sto­ry say­ing the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment was prepar­ing to admit that the coro­n­avirus orig­i­nat­ed in one of its labs. It did not, but the arti­cle still racked up over 19,000 tweets and 18,000 Face­book engage­ments, accord­ing to social track­ing web­site Buz­zSumo. . . . ”
2.–4chan and 2chan have been ampli­fy­ing the dis­in­for­ma­tion about the coro­n­avirus, echo­ing the false­hood that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment spread the virus. ” . . . . The web­site also pub­lished a ques­tion­able doc­u­ment that fed a con­spir­a­cy that the Chi­nese mil­i­tary spread the dis­ease delib­er­ate­ly. That doc­u­ment, which seems to have come from G News orig­i­nal­ly, has been pop­u­lar on anony­mous mes­sage boards like 4chan and 2chan. . . .”
3.–G News and its funder–Guo Wengui–are pro­fes­sion­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Steve Ban­non. ” . . . . G News is part of Guo Media, a project fund­ed by Chi­nese bil­lion­aire Guo Wen­gui, also known as Miles Kwok and Miles Guo. . . . In August 2018, Guo’s orga­ni­za­tion signed what Axios report­ed to be a $1 mil­lion con­tract with Steve Ban­non, for­mer White House strate­gist and for­mer chair of the hyper­par­ti­san news site Bre­it­bart. The con­tract required Ban­non to make intro­duc­tions to ‘media per­son­al­i­ties’ and advise on ‘indus­try stan­dards,’ accord­ing to Axios. Guo and Ban­non fre­quent­ly appear togeth­er in videos on G News that attack the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment. . . .”
4.–Associated with Steve Ban­non and G News is Dal­las-based hedge fund man­ag­er J. Kyle Bass, who is posi­tioned to make a great deal of mon­ey over a down­turn in the Chi­nese econ­o­my. ” . . . . Anoth­er per­son con­nect­ed to G News, hedge fund man­ag­er J. Kyle Bass, also spread a false coro­n­avirus claim in a tweet. His hedge fund report­ed­ly had invest­ments that will increase in val­ue if the Chi­nese econ­o­my fails . . . . Bass has remained a Chi­na crit­ic, fre­quent­ly echo­ing Ban­non.”
Bass, too, is tweet­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion about the virus: ” . . . . ‘A hus­band and wife Chi­nese spy team were recent­ly removed from a Lev­el 4 Infec­tious Dis­ease facil­i­ty in Cana­da for send­ing pathogens to the Wuhan facil­i­ty. The hus­band spe­cial­ized in coro­n­avirus research,’ Bass tweet­ed, link­ing to a CBC News arti­cle that did not sup­port his claim. . . .”
5.–Bass has no inten­tion of remov­ing his tweet, and is chair­man of a foun­da­tion that adver­tis­es on G News. ” . . . . When asked about his tweet, Bass said he had no plan to remove it. ‘I am extreme­ly con­cerned about the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion about the coro­n­avirus by the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment,’ he said. Bass is the chair of the Rule of Law Foun­da­tion, a non­prof­it that runs ban­ner ads at the top and bot­tom of the G News web­site solic­it­ing dona­tions. . . .”
6.–Bass denies any link between the Rule of Law Foun­da­tion and the Rule of Law Fund, found­ed by Guo and Ban­non, a claim of which we are skep­ti­cal. ” . . . . He also claimed that the Rule of Law Foun­da­tion was sep­a­rate from the $100 mil­lion fund start­ed by Guo and Ban­non called the Rule of Law Fund. . . .”

Sup­ple­ment­ing the pre­vi­ous arti­cle about Ban­non, J. Kyle Bass and Guo Wen­gui, we note that Bass is close to, and may well be a co-investor with, Tom­my Hicks Jr., a key mem­ber of Team Trump. Hicks, Com­merce Sec­re­tary Wilbur Ross and nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials are, in turn, work­ing to deny Chi­nese elec­tron­ics firm Huawei access to devel­op­ing 5G net­works, fur­ther ham­string­ing the Chi­nese econ­o­my.

Paul Krug­man, among oth­ers, has not­ed that Wilbur Ross was open­ly cel­e­brat­ing the coro­n­avirus as a boon to the Unit­ed States.

We high­light key aspects of this dis­cus­sion:

1.–Tommy Hicks is at the epi­cen­ter of Trump admin­is­tra­tion maneu­ver­ing that, ulti­mate­ly, will hurt Chi­na eco­nom­i­cal­ly (and will ben­e­fit the invest­ments of J. Kyle Bass.) Hic Over the past two years, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has been grap­pling with how to han­dle the tran­si­tion to the next gen­er­a­tion of mobile broad­band tech­nol­o­gy. With spend­ing expect­ed to run into hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars, the admin­is­tra­tion views it as an ultra-high-stakes com­pe­ti­tion between U.S. and Chi­nese com­pa­nies, with enor­mous impli­ca­tions both for tech­nol­o­gy and for nation­al secu­ri­ty. Top offi­cials from a raft of depart­ments have been meet­ing to hash out the best approach. But there’s been one per­son at some of the dis­cus­sions who has a dif­fer­ent back­ground: He’s Don­ald Trump Jr.’s hunt­ing bud­dy. . . .”
2.–Hicks is not a gov­ern­ment offi­cial but has access to high-lev­el gov­ern­men­tal process, includ­ing (appar­ent­ly) CIA activ­i­ties. ” . . . . Tom­my Hicks Jr., 41, isn’t a gov­ern­ment offi­cial; he’s a wealthy pri­vate investor. And he has been a part of dis­cus­sions relat­ed to Chi­na and tech­nol­o­gy with top offi­cials from the Trea­sury Depart­ment, Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, Com­merce Depart­ment and oth­ers, accord­ing to emails and doc­u­ments obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca. In one email, Hicks refers to a meet­ing at ‘Lan­g­ley,’ an appar­ent ref­er­ence to the CIA’s head­quar­ters. . . .”
3.–Hicks has used his posi­tion to arrange for J. Kyle Bass to net­work with gov­ern­ment agen­cies and offi­cials. Bear in mind that Bass is posi­tioned to ben­e­fit from a down­turn in Chi­na’s econ­o­my. ” . . . . Hicks used his con­nec­tions to arrange for a hedge fund man­ag­er friend, Kyle Bass — who has $143 mil­lion in invest­ments that will pay off if China’s econ­o­my tanks — to present his views on the Chi­nese econ­o­my to high-lev­el gov­ern­ment offi­cials at an inter­a­gency meet­ing at the Trea­sury Depart­ment, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. . . .”
4.–Hicks is no co-chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. ” . . . . Hicks lever­aged his Dal­las finan­cial net­work to become a top Trump cam­paign fundrais­er in 2016 and a vice chair­man of the inau­gur­al finance com­mit­tee; in Jan­u­ary, he was named co-chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. . . . ”
5.–In addi­tion to his rela­tion­ship with Don­ald Trump, Jr., Hicks is net­worked with Jared Kush­n­er. ” . . . . Even before becom­ing the sec­ond high­est-rank­ing GOP offi­cial, Hicks was a fre­quent White House guest. He liked to have lunch in the White House mess with his half sis­ter, who worked for a time in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions oper­a­tion. . . .  Hicks would then stroll the halls, accord­ing to a for­mer senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial, drop­ping in to offices for impromp­tu chats with var­i­ous offi­cials, includ­ing Jared Kush­n­er. Those sorts of con­nec­tions have giv­en Hicks a con­ven­ing pow­er, the abil­i­ty to call togeth­er mul­ti­ple offi­cials. . . . ”
6.–Again, Hicks net­work­ing can influ­ence pol­i­cy­mak­ing that could dam­age Chi­na eco­nom­i­cal­ly and assist Bass. ” . . . . ‘He basi­cal­ly opened the door for hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple who I didn’t know but need­ed to know,’ said Robert Spald­ing, a for­mer senior direc­tor for strate­gic plan­ning at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. The efforts, detailed in hun­dreds of pages of gov­ern­ment emails and oth­er doc­u­ments obtained under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, show that Hicks had access to the high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment to influ­ence pol­i­cy­mak­ing in ways that could lead to painful eco­nom­ic out­comes for the Chi­nese — and a poten­tial­ly lucra­tive result for Hicks’ hedge fund friend, Bass. . . .”
7.–Hicks and Bass have invest­ed togeth­er since 2011. ” . . . . Bass pre­sent­ed his views on China’s bank­ing sys­tem in the office of Heath Tar­bert, an assis­tant sec­re­tary at Trea­sury in charge of inter­na­tion­al mar­kets and invest­ment pol­i­cy and a pow­er­ful inter­gov­ern­men­tal com­mit­tee that reviews for­eign invest­ments in the U.S. for nation­al secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Among the offi­cials at the meet­ing with Tar­bert were Bill Hin­man, the direc­tor of the divi­sion of cor­po­ra­tion finance at the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion, and Ray Wash­burne, a wealthy Dal­las restau­rant own­er and fam­i­ly friend of Hicks’ who was nom­i­nat­ed by Trump to head the Over­seas Pri­vate Invest­ment Cor­po­ra­tion. Hicks and Bass, both Dal­las res­i­dents and long­time denizens of the finan­cial com­mu­ni­ty there, have invest­ed togeth­er since at least 2011, accord­ing to secu­ri­ties fil­ings and court records. . . .”
8.–Hicks did not deny that he par­tic­i­pat­ed in Bass’s funds, but was eva­sive.” . . . . But it’s not clear if Hicks or his fam­i­ly have an invest­ment in Bass’ Chi­na-relat­ed funds. Reached twice on his cell­phone, Hicks declined to be inter­viewed by ProP­ub­li­ca. In the sec­ond call, in June, Hicks didn’t dis­pute that he and his fam­i­ly have invest­ed in Bass’ funds. But when asked to detail their busi­ness rela­tion­ship, he cut the con­ver­sa­tion short. . . . ”
Bass has a his­to­ry of bet­ting against trends that will turn down­ward, hav­ing made his for­tune on the 2008 crash. ” . . . . Bass, who made his name and for­tune by bet­ting against sub­prime mort­gages before the crash and is known for large bets that economies or cer­tain macro trends will turn down­ward, declined to com­ment. . . .”
9.–Official review did not exam­ine pos­si­ble busi­ness rela­tion­ships between Hicks and Bass. H” . . . . An admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial briefed on the Bass meet­ing at the Trea­sury down­played it as ‘strict­ly a lis­ten­ing ses­sion.’ . . . . He acknowl­edged that the review didn’t include an exam­i­na­tion of any finan­cial rela­tion­ship between Hicks and Bass. . . .”
10.–Bass is posi­tioned to main­tain “mas­sive asym­me­try” to down turns in Hong Kong and Chi­na, in oth­er words, he will ben­e­fit if they go down. ” . . . . Bass has become a vocal advo­cate for an aggres­sive U.S. pol­i­cy toward Chi­na. On Twit­ter and on cable busi­ness chan­nels he’s denounced every­thing from the country’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty gov­ern­ment to its busi­ness prac­tices. Secu­ri­ties fil­ings show Bass raised $143 mil­lion from about 81 investors in two funds — invest­ments that would ben­e­fit if China’s cur­ren­cy were deval­ued or the coun­try faced cred­it or bank­ing crises. In April, in a let­ter to his investors, Bass wrote that his com­pa­ny, Hay­man Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, was posi­tioned for com­ing prob­lems in Hong Kong and was set up to ‘main­tain a mas­sive asym­me­try to a neg­a­tive out­come in Hong Kong and/or Chi­na.’ . . . ”
11.–Hicks has net­worked with Wilbur Ross, who has open­ly cel­e­brat­ed the coro­n­avirus out­break. Ross is deeply involved with the 5G maneu­ver­ing.” . . . . Hicks’ work on the 5G ini­tia­tive was exten­sive. . . . .  he was part of an infor­mal group led by then NSC offi­cial Spald­ing, that advo­cat­ed for a strat­e­gy in which the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment would plan out a nation­al pol­i­cy for 5G. . . . That same month Hicks attend­ed a 5G meet­ing that he’d arranged with Com­merce Sec­re­tary Wilbur Ross. Com­merce plays a key role in the future of 5G since a divi­sion with­in the agency man­ages gov­ern­ment spec­trum and anoth­er main­tains a list of com­pa­nies the gov­ern­ment believes are, or will become, nation­al secu­ri­ty threats. Com­pa­nies that end up on that list can be effec­tive­ly shut out from glob­al deal-mak­ing. The meet­ing with Ross focused heav­i­ly on the threat of Chi­na, said Ira Green­stein, who served as a White House aide and was part of Spalding’s 5G crew. . . .”
12.–Hicks is net­work­ing with ele­ments in Tai­wan with regard to the 5G devel­op­ments. ” . . . . It isn’t clear what influ­ence, if any, Hicks had in those deci­sions. But his pro­file is only ris­ing. In April, he led a Repub­li­can del­e­ga­tion to Tai­wan along­side a U.S. gov­ern­ment del­e­ga­tion. Hicks met with the country’s pres­i­dent, Tsai Ing-wen, who has late­ly been posi­tion­ing her country’s cor­po­ra­tions as safer providers of 5G equip­ment than those in Chi­na. Tsai thanked the U.S. for sell­ing arms to Tai­wan. She asked Hicks to con­vey her regards to the Trumps. . . .”

The broad­cast con­cludes with a read­ing of head­lines and, in some cas­es, text excerpts of arti­cles about the eco­nom­ic impact of the coro­n­avirus out­break, as well as xeno­pho­bic over-reac­tion on the part of many gov­ern­ments.

FTR #1110 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

As the title indi­cates, this pro­gram presents a pot­pour­ri of arti­cles cov­er­ing a num­ber of top­ics.

A com­mon thread unit­ing them is the ongo­ing New Cold War and ele­ments fac­tor­ing in the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings under­way in Wash­ing­ton. 

Reput­ed evi­dence of a new “hack” alleged­ly done by the G.R.U. does­n’t pass the sniffs test. 

Fac­tors to be weighed in con­nec­tion with the lat­est “hack” of the Ukrain­ian nat­ur­al gas com­pa­ny Buris­ma (on whose board Hunter Biden sits–a fact that has been a focal point of the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings):

1.–Blake Darche, co-founder and Chief Secu­ri­ty offi­cer of Area 1, the firm that “detect­ed” the lat­est “hack” has a strong past asso­ci­a­tion with Crowd­Strike, the firm that helped launch the New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da blitz about sup­posed Russ­ian hacks. Darche was a Prin­ci­pal Con­sul­tant at Crowd­Strike.
2.–CrowdStrike, in turn, has strong links to the Atlantic Coun­cil, one of the think tanks that is part and par­cel to the Inter­mar­i­um Con­ti­nu­ity dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 1098, 1099, 1100, 1101. Dmitri Alper­ovitch, the com­pa­ny’s co-founder and Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer is a senior fel­low at the Atlantic Coun­cil.
3.–An iron­ic ele­ment of the “analy­sis” of the hacks attrib­ut­es the acts to “Fan­cy Bear” and the G.R.U., based on alleged lazi­ness on the part of the alleged per­pe­tra­tors of the phish­ing attack. (Phish­ing attacks are very easy for a skilled actor to car­ry out in rel­a­tive anonymi­ty.) Area 1’s con­clu­sion is based on “pat­tern recog­ni­tion,” which is the embod­i­ment of lazi­ness. We are to believe that the G.R.U./Fancy Bear alleged perp used a “cook­ie cut­ter” approach.

As we have not­ed in many pre­vi­ous broad­casts and posts, cyber attacks are eas­i­ly dis­guised. Per­pe­trat­ing a “cyber false flag” oper­a­tion is dis­turbing­ly easy to do. In a world where the ver­i­fi­ably false and phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble “con­trolled demolition”/Truther non­sense has gained trac­tion, cyber false flag ops are all the more threat­en­ing and sin­is­ter.

Now, we learn that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Russ­ian.

” . . . . These tools could make it more dif­fi­cult for anti-virus com­pa­nies and foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors to attribute hacks to the CIA. Could this call the source of pre­vi­ous hacks into ques­tion? It appears that yes, this might be used to dis­guise the CIA’s own hacks to appear as if they were Russ­ian, Chi­nese, or from spe­cif­ic oth­er coun­tries. . . . This might allow a mal­ware cre­ator to not only look like they were speak­ing in Russ­ian or Chi­nese, rather than in Eng­lish, but to also look like they tried to hide that they were not speak­ing Eng­lish . . . .”

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion, and Russ­ian author­ship of the high-pro­file hacks.

With Buris­ma at the cen­ter of the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings in Wash­ing­ton, we note some inter­est­ing rela­tion­ships involv­ing Buris­ma and its board of direc­tors, on which Hunter Biden sits.

Some of the con­sid­er­a­tions to be weighed in that con­text

1.–Burisma formed a pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship with the Atlantic Coun­cil in 2017: ” . . . . In 2017, Buris­ma announced that it faced no active pros­e­cu­tion cas­es, then formed a part­ner­ship with the Atlantic Coun­cil, a US think-tank active in pro­mot­ing anti-cor­rup­tion efforts in Ukraine. Buris­ma donat­ed between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Atlantic Coun­cil last year . . . .  Kari­na Zlochevs­ka, Mr. [Buris­ma founder Myko­la] Zlochevsky’s daugh­ter, attend­ed an Atlantic Coun­cil round­table on pro­mot­ing best busi­ness prac­tices as recent­ly as last week. . . .”
2.–The firm had on its board of Buris­ma of both Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki and Cofer Black. ” . . . .When pros­e­cu­tors began inves­ti­gat­ing Burisma’s licens­es over self-deal­ing alle­ga­tions, Mr Zlochevsky stacked its board with West­ern lumi­nar­ies. . . .  they includ­ed for­mer Pol­ish pres­i­dent Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki, who had vis­it­ed Ukraine dozens of times as an EU envoy, and  . . . .  ex-Black­wa­ter direc­tor Cofer Black. In Mona­co, where he report­ed­ly lives, Mr Zlochevsky joint­ly organ­is­es an annu­al ener­gy con­fer­ence with Mr Kwasniewski’s foun­da­tion. . . . ”
3.–Kwasniewski was not only the EU’s envoy seek­ing ful­fill­ment of the EU asso­ci­a­tion agree­ment, but a key mem­ber of Paul Man­afort’s Haps­burg Group. The evi­dence about Man­afort work­ing with that assem­blage to maneu­ver Ukraine into the West­ern orbit is exten­sive. Some of the rel­e­vant pro­grams are: FTR #‘s 1008, 1009 (back­ground about the deep pol­i­tics sur­round­ing the Hapsburg–U.S. intel­li­gence alliance) and 1022.That the actu­al Maid­an Coup itself was sparked by a provo­ca­tion fea­tur­ing the lethal snip­ing by OUN/B suc­ces­sor ele­ments is per­sua­sive. Some of the rel­e­vant pro­grams are: FTR #‘s 982, 1023, 1024.
4.–Kwasniewski’s foun­da­tion’s annu­al ener­gy con­fer­ences bring to mind the Three Seas Ini­tia­tive and the cen­tral role of ener­gy in it. The TSI and the role of ener­gy in same is high­light­ed in the arti­cle at the core of FTR #‘s 1098–1101. In this con­text, note the role of the Atlantic Coun­cil in the TSI and its ener­gy com­po­nent, along with the part­ner­ship between Buris­ma and the Atlantic Coun­cil. The TSI and its ener­gy com­po­nent, in turn, are a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of the Inter­mar­i­um Con­ti­nu­ity, the mil­i­tary com­po­nent of which is now being cement­ed in the Impeach­ment Cir­cus: ” . . . . Under the men­tor­ship of Jarosław Kaczyńs­ki, the new Pol­ish pres­i­dent, Andrzej Duda, elect­ed in 2015, relaunched the idea of a Baltic-Black Sea alliance on the eve of his inau­gu­ra­tion under the label of ‘Three Seas Ini­tia­tive’ (TSI). Orig­i­nal­ly, the project grew out of a debate sparked by a report co-pub­lished by the Atlantic Coun­cil and the EU ener­gy lob­by group Cen­tral Europe Ener­gy Part­ners (CEEP) with the goal of pro­mot­ing big Cen­tral Euro­pean com­pa­nies’ inter­ests in the EU.[116] The report, enti­tled Com­plet­ing Europe—From the North-South Cor­ri­dor to Ener­gy, Trans­porta­tion, and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union, was co-edit­ed by Gen­er­al James L. Jones, Jr., for­mer Supreme Allied Com­man­der of NATO, U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor, and chair­man of the Atlantic Coun­cil, and Pawel Olech­now­icz, CEO of the Pol­ish oil and gas giant Gru­pa Lotos.[117] It ‘called for the accel­er­at­ed con­struc­tion of a North-South Cor­ri­dor of ener­gy, trans­porta­tion, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions links stretch­ing from the Baltic Sea to the Adri­at­ic and Black Seas,’ which at the time was still referred to as the ‘Adri­at­ic-Baltic-Black Sea Initiative.’[118] The report was pre­sent­ed in Brus­sels in March 2015, where, accord­ing to Fred­er­ick Kempe, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Atlantic Coun­cil, it ‘gen­er­at­ed a huge amount of excite­ment.’ . . . .”
The pres­ence on the Buris­ma board of Cofer Black “ex”-CIA and the for­mer direc­tor of Erik Prince’s Black­wa­ter out­fit is VERY impor­tant. Erik Prince is the broth­er of Trump Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Bet­sy De Vos and the busi­ness part­ner of John­son Cho Kun Sun, the Hong Kong-based oli­garch who sits on the board of Emer­da­ta, the rein­car­nat­ed Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. Both Cofer Black and Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki are in a posi­tion to pro­vide detailed intel­li­gence about the oper­a­tions of Buris­ma, includ­ing any data that the sup­posed “Russ­ian hack” might reveal.

With the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings now head­ing toward their most prob­a­ble conclusion–Trump’s acquit­tal– and with the inces­sant bab­ble about the non-exis­tent “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion, it is worth con­tem­plat­ing Amer­i­can inter­fer­ence in Russ­ian pol­i­tics.

Against the back­ground of decades of Amer­i­can-backed and/or ini­ti­at­ed coups over­throw­ing gov­ern­ments around the world, we high­light U.S. sup­port for Boris Yeltsin. Fol­low­ing the NED’s ele­va­tion of Nazi-allied fas­cists in Lithua­nia and the expan­sion of that Gehlen/CFF/GOP milieu inside the for­mer Sovi­et Union cour­tesy of the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, the U.S. hoist­ed Yeltsin into the dri­ver’s seat of the new­ly-mint­ed Rus­sia. (One should nev­er for­get that Jef­frey Sachs, a key eco­nom­ic advis­er to Bernie Sanders and Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez head­ed the team that sent the Russ­ian econ­o­my back to the stone age.)

Key points of con­sid­er­a­tion:

1.–” . . . . . . . . In late 1991, after the fall of the Sovi­et Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of spe­cial pow­ers from the Russ­ian Par­lia­ment: for one year, he was to be, in effect, the dic­ta­tor of Rus­sia to facil­i­tate the mid­wifery of the birth of a demo­c­ra­t­ic Rus­sia. In March of 1992, under pres­sure from a dis­con­tent­ed pop­u­la­tion, par­lia­ment repealed the dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers it had grant­ed him. Yeltsin respond­ed by declar­ing a state of emer­gency, giv­ing him­self the repealed dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers. Russia’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court ruled that Yeltsin was act­ing out­side the con­sti­tu­tion. But the US sided – against the Russ­ian peo­ple and against the Russ­ian Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court – with Yeltsin. . . .”
2.–” . . . . Yeltsin dis­solved the par­lia­ment that had rescind­ed his pow­ers and abol­ished the con­sti­tu­tion of which he was in vio­la­tion. In a 636–2 vote, the Russ­ian par­lia­ment impeached Yeltsin. But Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russ­ian peo­ple and Russ­ian law, giv­ing him $2.5 bil­lion in aid. . . .”
3.–” . . . . Yeltsin took the mon­ey and sent police offi­cers and elite para­troop­ers to sur­round the par­lia­ment build­ing. Clin­ton ‘praised the Russ­ian Pres­i­dent has (sic) hav­ing done ‘quite well’ in man­ag­ing the stand­off with the Russ­ian Par­lia­ment,’ as The New York Times report­ed at the time. Clin­ton added that he thought ‘the Unit­ed States and the free world ought to hang in there’ with their sup­port of Yeltsin against his peo­ple, their con­sti­tu­tion and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be ‘on the right side of his­to­ry.’ . . .”
4.–” . . . . On the right side of his­to­ry and armed with machine guns, Yeltsin’s troops opened fire on the crowd of pro­test­ers, killing about 100 peo­ple before set­ting the Russ­ian par­lia­ment build­ing on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin’s troops had killed an uncon­firmed 500 peo­ple and wound­ed near­ly 1,000. Still, Clin­ton stood with Yeltsin. . . .”
5.–” . . . . In 1996, Amer­i­ca would inter­fere yet again. With elec­tions loom­ing, Yeltsin’s pop­u­lar­i­ty was nonex­is­tent, and his approval rat­ing was at about 6 per­cent. Accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Russ­ian Stud­ies at Prince­ton, Stephen Cohen, Clinton’s inter­fer­ence in Russ­ian pol­i­tics, his ‘cru­sade’ to ‘reform Rus­sia,’ had by now become offi­cial pol­i­cy. And, so, Amer­i­ca bold­ly inter­fered direct­ly in Russ­ian elec­tions. Three Amer­i­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tants, receiv­ing ‘direct assis­tance from Bill Clinton’s White House,’ secret­ly ran Yeltsin’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. As Time mag­a­zine broke the sto­ry, ‘For four months, a group of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tants clan­des­tine­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in guid­ing Yeltsin’s cam­paign.’ ‘Fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment,’ Cohen reports, Amer­i­cans ‘gave mon­ey to favored Russ­ian politi­cians, instruct­ed min­is­ters, draft­ed leg­is­la­tion and pres­i­den­tial decrees, under­wrote text­books, and served at Yeltsin’s reelec­tion head­quar­ters in 1996.’ . . . .”
6.–” . . . . Then ambas­sador to Rus­sia Thomas Pick­er­ing even pres­sured an oppos­ing can­di­date to drop out of the elec­tion to improve Yeltsin’s odds of win­ning. . . .”
7.–” . . . . The US not only helped run Yeltsin’s cam­paign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 bil­lion Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) loan for Rus­sia, the sec­ond-biggest loan the IMF had ever giv­en. The New York Times report­ed that the loan was ‘expect­ed to be help­ful to Pres­i­dent Boris N. Yeltsin in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in June.’ . . .”

FTR #1104 Fascism, 2019 World Tour, Part 14: Lithium Coup in Bolivia, Part 1 and FTR #1105 Fascism, 2019 World Tour, Part 15: Lithium Coup in Bolivia, Part 2

These pro­grams high­light fea­tures of an appar­ent coup d’e­tat in Bolivia, empha­siz­ing the indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions fig­ur­ing in the coup itself, as well as the under­ly­ing dynam­ic of the devel­op­ment of Bolivi­a’s enor­mous lithi­um reserves. Cen­tral to the dis­cus­sion is the fact that lithi­um is essen­tial for the devel­op­ment of elec­tric car bat­ter­ies and that tech­nol­o­gy is impor­tant to any suc­cess­ful “Green­ing” of the glob­al econ­o­my.

Fas­cists from Latin Amer­i­ca and Europe net­worked with transna­tion­al cor­po­rate ele­ments and some U.S. intel­li­gence cut-outs to oust Evo Morales and his gov­ern­ment.

Although Morales had vio­lat­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al norms on term lim­its in order to extend his gov­er­nance, his polit­i­cal agen­da had great­ly ben­e­fit­ed Bolivi­a’s poor and its his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed indige­nous pop­u­la­tion, in par­tic­u­lar. The coun­try’s min­er­al wealth has been exploit­ed by for­eign com­pa­nies and select mem­bers of the Boli­vian elite to the detri­ment of much of the pop­u­la­tion. Even the con­ser­v­a­tive “Finan­cial Times” has not­ed that Morales restruc­tur­ing of the Boli­vian economy–mineral extrac­tion, in particular–has sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved the coun­try’s econ­o­my and reduced pover­ty.

This ele­ment of dis­cus­sion involves many sub­jects cov­ered at length over the decades and fea­tured in the archives:

1.–Material about Klaus Bar­bie and the Euro­pean fas­cists in his “Fiances of Death” (or “Bride­grooms of Death”) mer­ce­nar­ies can be found in, among oth­er pro­grams, AFA #‘s 19 and 27.
2.–The Vat­i­can’s rela­tion­ship to fas­cism, includ­ing Opus Dei and the Ustachi in Croa­t­ia, is high­light­ed in, among oth­er pro­grams AFA #17.
3.–Information about the re-emer­gence of the Ustachi can be found in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 49, 154, 766, 901.

Key indi­vid­ual and insti­tu­tion­al play­ers in the devel­op­ment of, pre­lude to, and exe­cu­tion of the Boli­vian coup include:

1.–Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho, a wealthy Boli­vian described in the Pana­ma Papers, Cama­cho is: ” . . . . an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist groomed by a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary noto­ri­ous for its racist vio­lence, with a base in Bolivia’s wealthy sep­a­ratist region of San­ta Cruz. . . .”
2.–He is heir to a tra­di­tion of wealth, the nation’s nat­ur­al gas busi­ness, in par­tic­u­lar: : ” . . . . Cama­cho also hails from a fam­i­ly of cor­po­rate elites who have long prof­it­ed from Bolivia’s plen­ti­ful nat­ur­al gas reserves. And his fam­i­ly lost part of its wealth when Morales nation­al­ized the nation’s resources, in order to fund his vast social pro­grams — which cut pover­ty by 42 per­cent and extreme pover­ty by 60 per­cent. . . .”
3.–Prior to the coup, Cama­cho: ” . . . . met with lead­ers from right-wing gov­ern­ments in the region to dis­cuss their plans to desta­bi­lize Morales. Two months before the putsch, he tweet­ed grat­i­tude: ‘Thank you Colom­bia! Thank you Venezuela!’ he exclaimed, tip­ping his hat to Juan Guaido’s coup oper­a­tion. He also rec­og­nized the far-right gov­ern­ment of Jair Bol­sonaro, declar­ing, “Thank you Brazil!’ . . .”
4.–A mar­gin­al fig­ure with lit­tle pub­lic grav­i­tas, includ­ing on social media, Cama­cho was mov­ing to neu­tral­ize the Morales gov­ern­ment before the coup itself. His polit­i­cal pres­ence and base of sup­port is a Chris­t­ian fas­cist orga­ni­za­tion: ” . . . . Luis Fer­nan­do Cama­cho was groomed by the Unión Juve­nil Cruceñista, or San­ta Cruz Youth Union (UJC), a fas­cist para­mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion that has been linked to assas­si­na­tion plots against Morales. The group is noto­ri­ous for assault­ing left­ists, Indige­nous peas­ants, and jour­nal­ists, all while espous­ing a deeply racist, homo­pho­bic ide­ol­o­gy. . . .”
5.–The UJC: ” . . . . The UJC is the Boli­vian equiv­a­lent of Spain’s Falange, India’s Hin­du suprema­cist RSS, and Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov bat­tal­ion. Its sym­bol is a green cross that bears strong sim­i­lar­i­ties to logos of fas­cist move­ments across the West. And its mem­bers are known to launch into Nazi-style sieg heil salutes. . . . Even the US embassy in Bolivia has described UJC mem­bers as ‘racist’ and ‘mil­i­tant,’ not­ing that they ‘have fre­quent­ly attacked pro-MAS/­gov­ern­ment peo­ple and instal­la­tions.’ . . .”
6.–Camacho was allied with a wealthy Croa­t­ian named Branko Marinkovic: ” . . . . Cama­cho was elect­ed as vice pres­i­dent of the UJC in 2002, when he was just 23 years old. He left the orga­ni­za­tion two years lat­er to build his family’s busi­ness empire and rise through the ranks of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee. It was in that orga­ni­za­tion that he was tak­en under the wing of one of the sep­a­ratist movement’s most pow­er­ful fig­ures, a Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch named Branko Marinkovic. . . .”
7.–Marinkovic is one of the prime movers of a seces­sion­ist move­ment for the San­ta Cruz area: ” . . . . Camacho’s Croa­t­ian god­fa­ther and sep­a­ratist pow­er bro­ker Branko Marinkovic is a major landown­er who ramped up his sup­port for the right-wing oppo­si­tion after some of his land was nation­al­ized by the Evo Morales gov­ern­ment. As chair­man of the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee, he over­saw the oper­a­tions of the main engine of sep­a­ratism in Bolivia. In a 2008 let­ter to Marinkovic, the Inter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion for Human Rights denounced the com­mit­tee as an ‘actor and pro­mot­er of racism and vio­lence in Bolivia.’ The human rights group added that it ‘condemn[ed] the atti­tude and seces­sion­ist, union­ist and racist dis­cours­es as well as the calls for mil­i­tary dis­obe­di­ence of which the Pro-San­ta Cruz Civic Com­mit­tee for is one of the main pro­mot­ers.’ In 2013, jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed that the US gov­ern­ment was work­ing close­ly with the Pro-San­ta Cruz Com­mit­tee to encour­age the balka­niza­tion of Bolivia and to under­mine Morales. . . .”
8.–There has been spec­u­la­tion that Marinkovich may be descend­ed from Croa­t­ian Ustachis fas­cists: ” . . . . But even some of his sym­pa­thiz­ers are skep­ti­cal. A Balkan ana­lyst from the pri­vate intel­li­gence firm Strat­for, which works close­ly with the US gov­ern­ment and is pop­u­lar­ly known as the ‘shad­ow CIA,’ pro­duced a rough back­ground pro­file on Marinkovic, spec­u­lat­ing, ‘Still don’t know his full sto­ry, but I would bet a lot of $$$ that this dude’s par­ents are 1st gen (his name is too Slav­ic) and that they were Ustashe (read: Nazi) sym­pa­thiz­ers flee­ing Tito’s Com­mu­nists after WWII.’ . . . .”
9.–Marinkovich’s activism in the San­ta Cruz area is part of a fas­cist polit­i­cal land­scape in that area that dove­tails with Klaus Bar­bie (of whom we spoke in–among oth­er programs–AFA #19): ” . . . . In a 2008 pro­file on Marinkovic, “The New York Times” acknowl­edged the extrem­ist under­cur­rents of the San­ta Cruz sep­a­ratist move­ment the oli­garch presided over. It described the area as ‘a bas­tion of open­ly xeno­pho­bic groups like the Boli­vian Social­ist Falange, whose hand-in-air salute draws inspi­ra­tion from the fas­cist Falange of the for­mer Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­co.” The Boli­vian Social­ist Falange was a fas­cist group that pro­vid­ed safe haven to Nazi war crim­i­nal Klaus Bar­bie dur­ing the Cold War. A for­mer Gestapo tor­ture expert, Bar­bie was repur­posed by the CIA through its Oper­a­tion Con­dor pro­gram to help exter­mi­nate com­mu­nism across the con­ti­nent. . . .”
10.–The coup fol­lows by some years an attempt by a group of inter­na­tion­al fas­cists to mur­der Morales: ” . . . . In April 2009, a spe­cial unit of the Boli­vian secu­ri­ty ser­vices barged into a lux­u­ry hotel room and cut down three men who were said to be involved in a plot to kill Evo Morales. Two oth­ers remained on the loose. Four of the alleged con­spir­a­tors had Hun­gar­i­an or Croa­t­ian roots and ties to right­ist pol­i­tics in east­ern Europe, while anoth­er was a right-wing Irish­man, Michael Dwyer, who had only arrived in San­ta Cruz six months before. The ring­leader of the group was said to be a for­mer left­ist jour­nal­ist named Eduar­do Rosza-Flo­res who had turned to fas­cism and belonged to Opus Dei, the tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholic cult that emerged under the dic­ta­tor­ship of Spain’s Fran­cis­co Fran­co. . . .”
11.–Eduardo Rosza-Flo­res had fought in the for­mer Yugoslavia on behalf of the neo-Ustachi regime that ulti­mate­ly came to pow­er: ” . . . . Dur­ing the 1990s, Rosza fought on behalf of the Croa­t­ian First Inter­na­tion­al Pla­toon, or the PIV, in the war to sep­a­rate from Yugoslavia. A Croa­t­ian jour­nal­ist told Time that the ‘PIV was a noto­ri­ous group: 95% of them had crim­i­nal his­to­ries, many were part of Nazi and fas­cist groups, from Ger­many to Ire­land.’ By 2009, Rosza returned home to Bolivia to cru­sade on behalf of anoth­er sep­a­ratist move­ment in San­ta Cruz. . . .”
12.–Rosza-Flores had no mon­ey, yet his group of would-be fas­cist assas­sins were well fund­ed. Marinkovic appears to have been among the fund­ing sources: ” . . . . Marinkovic was sub­se­quent­ly charged with pro­vid­ing $200,000 to the plot­ters. The Boli­vian-Croa­t­ian oli­garch ini­tial­ly fled to the Unit­ed States, where he was giv­en asy­lum, then relo­cat­ed to Brazil, where he lives today. He denied any involve­ment in the plan to kill Morales. As jour­nal­ist Matt Ken­nard report­ed, there was anoth­er thread that tied the plot to the US: the alleged par­tic­i­pa­tion of an NGO leader named Hugo Achá Mel­gar. . . .”
13.–Hugo Acha Mel­gar was net­worked with the Human Rights Foun­da­tion, a right-wing orga­ni­za­tion with strong links to U.S. intel­li­gence and financed in part by Peter Thiel. The Human Rights Foun­da­tion is involved in the Hong Kong tur­moil. ” . . . . Achá was not just the head of any run-of-the-mill NGO. He had found­ed the Boli­vian sub­sidiary of the Human Rights Foun­da­tion (HRF), an inter­na­tion­al right-wing out­fit that is known for host­ing a “school for rev­o­lu­tion” for activists seek­ing regime change in states tar­get­ed by the US gov­ern­ment. HRF is run by Thor Halvorssen Jr., the son of the late Venezue­lan oli­garch and CIA asset Thor Halvorssen Hel­lum.  . . . . He launched the HRF with grants from right-wing bil­lion­aires like Peter Thiel, con­ser­v­a­tive foun­da­tions, and NGOs includ­ing Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al. The group has since been at the fore­front of train­ing activists for insur­rec­tionary activ­i­ty from Hong Kong to the Mid­dle East to Latin Amer­i­ca. . . .”
14.–Proxy pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Car­los Mesa is heav­i­ly net­worked with the Inter-Amer­i­can Dia­logue, financed in con­sid­er­able mea­sure by the AID: ” . . . . Today, Mesa serves as an in-house “expert” at the Inter-Amer­i­can Dia­logue, a neolib­er­al Wash­ing­ton-based think tank focused on Latin Amer­i­ca. One of the Dialogue’s top donors is the US Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (USAID) . . . .”

Cen­tral to the mul­ti-nation­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion with Evo Morales is his nation­al­iza­tion of some of Bolivi­a’s min­er­al resource indus­try. And cen­tral to the Boli­vian min­er­al resource inven­to­ry is lithi­um, essen­tial for the man­u­fac­ture of elec­tric car bat­ter­ies: ” . . . . The main tar­get is its mas­sive deposits of lithi­um, cru­cial for the elec­tric car. . . .”

Bolivia has been report­ed to hold up to 70 per­cent of the world’s lithi­um, and the Morales gov­ern­men­t’s piv­ot toward devel­op­ing those reserves in tan­dem with Chi­nese firms, rather than West­ern transna­tion­als, may well have been the cen­tral dynam­ic in his ouster. ” . . . . Over the course of the past few years, Bolivia has strug­gled to raise invest­ment to devel­op the lithi­um reserves in a way that brings the wealth back into the coun­try for its peo­ple. Morales’ Vice Pres­i­dent Álvaro Gar­cía Lin­era had said that lithi­um is the ‘fuel that will feed the world.’ Bolivia was unable to make deals with West­ern transna­tion­al firms; it decid­ed to part­ner with Chi­nese firms. This made the Morales gov­ern­ment vul­ner­a­ble. It had walked into the new Cold War between the West and Chi­na. The coup against Morales can­not be under­stood with­out a glance at this clash. . . .”

The com­plex­i­ties of the Salar de Uyu­ni salt flats–location of much of Bolivi­a’s lithi­um reserves–mandate the tech­no­log­i­cal involve­ment of for­eign firms. A deal reached with Ger­man ACI Sys­tems (heav­i­ly sub­si­dized by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment) was negat­ed by protests on the part of local res­i­dents in the Salar de Uyu­ni area. Chi­nese firms were poised to fill that vac­u­um, offer­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a more equi­table devel­op­ment of the min­er­al. ” . . . . Last year, Germany’s ACI Sys­tems agreed to a deal with Bolivia. After protests from res­i­dents in the Salar de Uyu­ni region, Morales can­celed that deal on Novem­ber 4, 2019. Chi­nese firms—such as TBEA Group and Chi­na Machin­ery Engineering—made a deal with YLB. It was being said that China’s Tian­qi Lithi­um Group, which oper­ates in Argenti­na, was going to make a deal with YLB. Both Chi­nese invest­ment and the Boli­vian lithi­um com­pa­ny were exper­i­ment­ing with new ways to both mine the lithi­um and to share the prof­its of the lithi­um. The idea that there might be a new social com­pact for the lithi­um was unac­cept­able to the main transna­tion­al min­ing com­pa­nies. . . .”

After the ouster of Morales, the val­ue of Tes­la’s stock increased dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

The ACI/Bolivia deal had heavy back­ing by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment and fea­tured the planned export of lithi­um to Ger­many and else­where in Europe. ” . . . . With the joint ven­ture, Boli­vian state com­pa­ny YLB is team­ing up with Germany’s pri­vate­ly-owned ACI Sys­tems to devel­op its mas­sive Uyu­ni salt flat and build a lithi­um hydrox­ide plant as well as a fac­to­ry for elec­tric vehi­cle bat­ter­ies in Bolivia. ACI Sys­tems is also in talks to sup­ply com­pa­nies based in Ger­many and else­where in Europe with lithi­um from Bolivia. . . . Wolf­gang Schmutz, CEO of ACI Group, the par­ent com­pa­ny of ACI Sys­tems, said more than 80 per­cent of the lithi­um would be export­ed to Ger­many. . . .”

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for the dis­cus­sion to fol­low is ” . . . . Chi­na’s dom­i­nance in the glob­al lithi­um sup­ply chain and its strong ties with La Paz. . . .”

Short­ly after the ouster of Morales, Tes­la announced that Tes­la would locate a new car and elec­tric bat­tery fac­to­ry near Berlin. If the ACI lithi­um devel­op­ment project in Bolivia is resus­ci­tat­ed, the Tes­la move will give the firm access to the Boli­vian lithi­um.

Might that have been the rea­son for the rise in Tes­la’s stock? Might there have been some insid­er trad­ing?

The pro­grams con­clude with review of the rebirth of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca as a syn­the­sis with British “psy-op” devel­op­ment firm SCL. A key direc­tor of Emerdata–the new firm–is a Hong Kong financier and busi­ness part­ner of Black­wa­ter chief Erik Prince, the broth­er of Trump Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Bet­sy de Vos. Not­ing the firm for­mer­ly known as Black­wa­ter’s deep involve­ment in the world of covert oper­a­tions and for­mer Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca lynch­pin Steve Ban­non’s piv­otal role in the anti-Chi­na move­ment, it is not unrea­son­able to ask if Emer­da­ta may be involved in the Hong Kong tur­moil.

We also review Chi­na’s lead­er­ship in the devel­op­ment of Green tech­nolo­gies.

FTR #1103 Fascism, 2019 World Tour, Part 13: Goose-Hopping in Hong Kong with Pepe the Frog and the Azov Battalion

We have been high­light­ing the role of Ukraine as a “piv­ot point” for the Earth Island or World Island, and the evo­lu­tion of the Inter­mar­i­um con­cept in the appli­ca­tion of fas­cist con­trol of that unfor­tu­nate coun­try. 

Stretch­ing from the Straits of Gibral­tar, all across Europe, most of the Mid­dle East, Eura­sia, Rus­sia, Chi­na and India, that stretch of land: com­pris­es most of the world’s land mass; con­tains most of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and most of the world’s nat­ur­al resources (includ­ing oil and nat­ur­al gas.) Geopoliti­cians have long seen con­trol­ling that land mass as the key to world dom­i­na­tion.

Key to ana­lyz­ing the real­iza­tion of con­trol of the Ukrain­ian “piv­ot point” is the OUN milieu and its man­i­fes­ta­tion through the bet­ter part of the last cen­tu­ry. 

On our Fas­cism: 2019 World Tour, we have cov­ered the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na and Hong Kong, as well as the oper­a­tions of the Ukrain­ian Nazi Azov milieu. Now, there has been some­thing of a con­ver­gence.

Aug­ment­ing the right-wing and fas­cist pres­ence in Hong Kong are vet­er­ans of the Azov Bat­tal­ion and Pravy Sek­tor. ” . . . . The lat­est col­lec­tion of extreme-right activists to rein­force the ranks of the Hong Kong sep­a­ratists are from Ukraine. They call them­selves Gonor and have tat­toos on their upper tor­sos with unde­ni­able sym­bols of white suprema­cy and neo-Nazism. These extrem­ists pre­vi­ous­ly fought in a noto­ri­ous­ly bru­tal neo-Nazi mili­tia called the Azov Bat­tal­ion, in Ukraine’s war against pro-Russ­ian mil­i­tants. . . .”

The Gonor con­tin­gent includes a for­mer leader of Pravy Sek­tor (Right Sec­tor). ” . . . . Jour­nal­ist Mor­gan Artyukhi­na iden­ti­fied anoth­er mem­ber of the far-right Ukrain­ian con­tin­gent in Hong Kong as Ser­hii Ster­nenko. Artyukhi­na not­ed that Ster­nenko is a for­mer leader of the Ukrain­ian fas­cist group Right Sec­tor, which burned down a trade union build­ing in Odessa dur­ing the 2014 coup, killing 42 peo­ple. . . .”

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is the fact that the Ukrain­ian fas­cists are in Hong Kong under the aus­pices of an EU-financed NGO. ” . . . . The Free Hong Kong Cen­ter is a project of an NGO called the Lib­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic League of Ukraine. In addi­tion to build­ing links with anti-Bei­jing forces in Hong Kong, the project says its mis­sion is to ‘counter Chi­nese threats to Ukraine.’ The Lib­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic League of Ukraine is a pro-Euro­pean Union advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion which is a mem­ber of the Euro­pean Lib­er­al Youth and the Inter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion of Lib­er­al Youth, both of which are fund­ed by the EU. . . .”

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include:

1.–The Azov and Pravy Sek­tor vet­er­ans call them­selves Gonor and the NGO that facil­i­tat­ed their entry into Hong Kong white­washed the Nazi/fascist nature of the group.
2.–Members of the group sport­ed a vari­ety of Nazi and fas­cist tat­toos, includ­ing the “Vic­to­ry or Val­hal­la” slo­gan that was the title of a book by David Lane. Lane drove the get­away car for the mur­der of talk-show host Alan Berg and mint­ed the 14 Words—emblematic for the inter­na­tion­al Nazi move­ment. Svoboda’s C14 mili­tia takes its name from the 14 words.  ” . . . . Sev­er­al pho­tos show that at least two of the Ukrain­ian fas­cists in Hong Kong have tat­toos read­ing “Vic­to­ry or Val­hal­la,” the title of a com­pi­la­tion of writ­ings by the noto­ri­ous Amer­i­can white suprema­cist David Lane, whose neo-fas­cist ter­ror­ist group The Order mur­dered a lib­er­al Jew­ish radio host and planned more assas­si­na­tions of left-wing Jews. Lane, who was con­vict­ed to 190 years in a US prison for numer­ous crimes, cre­at­ed the most famous white suprema­cist slo­gan, known as the 14 Words — which inspired the name of anoth­er Ukrain­ian neo-Nazi group called C14. . . .”
3.–Gonor has embraced the slo­gan “Stand with Hong Kong.” ” . . . .  Stand With Hong Kong is also the name of a West­ern-backed orga­ni­za­tion that has been lob­by­ing the gov­ern­ments of the US, Britain, Ger­many, Cana­da, and Aus­tralia to impose sanc­tions and take puni­tive action against Chi­na. . . .”
4.–Gonor’s Telegram chan­nel has high­light­ed acts of vio­lence by the “pro-Democ­ra­cy” demon­stra­tors. ” . . . . Gonor’s Telegram chan­nel offers mem­bers a front row seat to an orgy of vio­lence. It has pub­lished dozens of videos of Hong Kong insur­gents, hero­iz­ing them for shoot­ing arrows and car­ry­ing out bru­tal attacks on state secu­ri­ty forces. . . .”
5.–The NGO—The Free Hong Kong Cen­ter (a sub­sidiary of the Lib­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic League of Ukraine) also white­washed the Nazi char­ac­ter of the Azov Bat­tal­ion.
6.–The Ukrain­ian Nazis had obtained press pass­es for their pres­ence in Hong Kong.
7.–The Ukrain­ian Nazis were emphat­ic about their pres­ence in Hong Kong being an exten­sion of the Maid­an coup.
8.–The pres­ence of the Ukrain­ian fas­cists in Hong Kong appears to be an exten­sion of Amer­i­can and EU Earth Island geo-polit­i­cal activism.
9.–Are the Azov and Pravy Sek­tor vet­er­ans in Hong Kong to pro­vide a vio­lent, mil­i­tary pres­ence as part of the Hong Kong desta­bi­liza­tion effort? Are we wit­ness­ing a “Hong Kong” Maid­an?

In FTR #1089, we not­ed the pres­ence of Pepe the Frog as an icon­ic pres­ence in the Hong Kong tur­moil. 

Steve Bannon–one of the lumi­nar­ies of the “Alt-Right,” and a for­mer key Trump aide is cen­tral­ly involved in the anti-Chi­na effort. This sug­gests that the pres­ence of Pepe the Frog’s image in Hong Kong might have some­thing to do with the “Alt-Right” after all.

As dis­cussed in–among oth­er programs–FTR #‘s 946 and 1077, Ban­non was at the epi­cen­ter of the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca cyber-psy-op dur­ing the 2016 elec­tion. One of the prin­ci­pal oper­a­tors of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca was Christo­pher Wylie. 

We won­der if the tech­niques used by Ban­non, Wylie, Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, SCL et al might have been used in Hong Kong? The the lais­sez-faire econ­o­my of Hong Kong has seen a 300 per­cent increase in rents while income has stag­nat­ed, thus impov­er­ish­ing 20% of Hong Kong’s pop­u­la­tion. Many young peo­ple in Hong Kong might well be vul­ner­a­ble to the type of social media psy-op that Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca spe­cial­ized in.

Was such a tech­nique employed to help gen­er­ate the unrest in Hong Kong?

In our next pro­gram, we will review the rebirth of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, with a Hong Kong-based financier and busi­ness part­ner of Erik Prince (of Black­wa­ter fame and the broth­er of Trump Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Bet­sy DeVos) on the board of direc­tors.

Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca is rebrand­ing under a new com­pa­ny, Emer­da­ta. Intrigu­ing­ly, Cam­bridge Analytica’s trans­for­ma­tion into Emer­da­ta is note­wor­thy because  the fir­m’s direc­tors include John­son Ko Chun Shun, a Hong Kong financier and busi­ness part­ner of Erik Prince: ” . . . . But the company’s announce­ment left sev­er­al ques­tions unan­swered, includ­ing who would retain the company’s intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty — the so-called psy­cho­graph­ic vot­er pro­files built in part with data from Face­book — and whether Cam­bridge Analytica’s data-min­ing busi­ness would return under new aus­pices. . . . In recent months, exec­u­tives at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca and SCL Group, along with the Mer­cer fam­i­ly, have moved to cre­at­ed a new firm, Emer­da­ta, based in Britain, accord­ing to British records. The new company’s direc­tors include John­son Ko Chun Shun, a Hong Kong financier and busi­ness part­ner of Erik Prince. . . . An exec­u­tive and a part own­er of SCL Group, Nigel Oakes, has pub­licly described Emer­da­ta as a way of rolling up the two com­pa­nies under one new ban­ner. . . . ”

The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Wik­iLeaks’ links to Chi­nese and Tibetan dis­si­dent activists and spec­u­la­tion about the CIA’s Edward Snow­den’s activ­i­ties in Hong Kong–the first stop on his inter­na­tion­al odyssey. In Hong Kong, he net­worked with Wik­iLeaks, who then facil­i­tat­ed his decamp­ment to Moscow. That trip was the open­ing gam­bit in the New Cold War.

In our next pro­gram, we will fur­ther dis­cuss Chi­na’s role as an inter­na­tion­al leader in Green tech­nol­o­gy and the impli­ca­tions of this for the Lithi­um Coup in Bolivia.

FTR #1081 Surveillance Valley, Part 7: Yasha Levine Gets the Jim Garrison/Gary Webb Treatment

We empha­size the treat­ment afford­ed Yasha Levine. As might be expect­ed, Levine received the Jim Garrison/Gary Webb treat­ment. The ret­ri­bu­tion direct­ed at Yasha Levine epit­o­mizes why Mr. Emory refers to the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor as “so-called.”

” . . . . The threats and attacks had begun some­time overnight while I slept. By morn­ing, they had reached a vicious and mur­der­ous pitch. There were calls for my death—by fire, by suf­fo­ca­tion, by hav­ing my throat slit by razor blades. Peo­ple I had nev­er met called me a rapist, and alleged that I took delight in beat­ing women and forc­ing peo­ple to have sex with me. I was accused of homo­pho­bia. Anony­mous peo­ple filed bogus claims with my edi­tor. Alle­ga­tions that I was a CIA agent poured in, as did claims that I worked with British intel­li­gence. The fact that I had been born in the Sovi­et Union did­n’t do me any favors; nat­u­ral­ly, I was accused of being an FSB spy and of work­ing for Rus­si­a’s suc­ces­sor to the KGB. I was informed that my name was added to a dark net assas­si­na­tion list—a site where peo­ple could place anony­mous bids for my mur­der. The roam­ing eye of the Inter­net hate machine had sud­den­ly fixed on me. . . .”

In addi­tion to online bul­ly­ing, slan­der and veiled and direct threats, the so-called “pri­va­cy activists” joined in pil­lo­ry­ing Yasha Levine: ” . . . . Mic­ah Lee, the for­mer EFF tech­nol­o­gist who helped Edward Snow­den com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly with jour­nal­ists and who now works at The Inter­cept, attacked me as a con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist and accused me and my col­leagues at Pan­do of being sex­ist bul­lies, he claimed that my report­ing was moti­vat­ed not by a desire to get at the truth but by a mali­cious impulse to harass a female Tor devel­op­er. Although Lee con­ced­ed that my infor­ma­tion about Tor’s gov­ern­ment fund­ing was cor­rect, he counter intu­itive­ly argued that it did­n’t mat­ter. . . .

” . . . . Jour­nal­ists, experts, and tech­nol­o­gists from groups like the ACLU, the EFF, Free­dom of the Press Foun­da­tion and The Inter­cept and employ­ees of the Tor Project joined in to attack my report­ing. Unlike Lee, most did not attempt to engage my report­ing but employed a range of famil­iar PR smear tactics—tactics you usu­al­ly see used by cor­po­rate flacks, not prin­ci­pled pri­va­cy activists. They took to social media, telling any­one who showed inter­est in my arti­cles that they should ignore them instead. Then, when that did­n’t work, they tried to dis­cred­it my report­ing with ridicule, mis­di­rec­tion, and crude insults. . . .

” . . . . A respect­ed ACLU pri­va­cy expert, who now works as a con­gres­sion­al staffer, called me “a con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist  who sees black heli­copters every­where” and com­pared my report­ing about Tor to the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. As some­one who escaped state-spon­sored anti-Semi­tism in the Sovi­et Union, I found the com­par­i­son extreme­ly offen­sive, espe­cial­ly com­ing from the ACLU. The Pro­to­cols were an anti-Semit­ic forgery dis­sem­i­nat­ed by the Russ­ian Tsar’s secret police that unleashed waves of dead­ly pogroms against Jews across the Russ­ian Empire in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Tor employ­ees put forth a tor­rent of child­ish insults, call­ing me a ‘dumb Stal­in­ist state-felch­er’ and a ‘fuck­tard’s fuck­tard.’ They accused me of being fund­ed by spies to under­mine faith in cryp­tog­ra­phy. One of them claimed that I was a rapist, and hurled homo­pho­bic insults about the var­i­ous ways in which I had sup­pos­ed­ly per­formed sex­u­al favors for a male col­league.

 “In the way that these Inter­net haz­ing ses­sions, go, the cam­paign evolved and spread. Strange peo­ple began threat­en­ing me and my col­leagues on social media. Some accused me of hav­ing blood on my hands and of rack­ing up an “activist body count”–that peo­ple were actu­al­ly dying because of my report­ing under­mined trust in Tor.The attacks widened to include reg­u­lar read­ers and social media users, any­one who had the nerve to ask ques­tions about Tor’s fund­ing sources. An employ­ee of the Tor Project went so far as to dox an anony­mous Twit­ter user, expos­ing his real iden­ti­ty and con­tact­ing his employ­er in the hopes of get­ting him fired from his job as a junior phar­ma­cist.

It was bizarre. I watched all this unfold in real time but had no idea how to respond. Even more dis­con­cert­ing was that the attacks soon expand­ed to include libelous sto­ries placed in rep­utable media out­lets. The Guardian pub­lished a sto­ry by a free­lancer accus­ing me of run­ning an online sex­u­al harass­ment and bul­ly­ing cam­paign. The Los Ange­les Review of Books, gen­er­al­ly a good jour­nal of arts and cul­ture, ran an essay by a free­lancer alleg­ing that my report­ing was fund­ed by the CIA. Paul Carr, my edi­tor at Pan­do, lodged offi­cial com­plaints and demand­ed to know how these reporters came to their con­clu­sions. Both pub­li­ca­tions ulti­mate­ly retract­ed their state­ments and print­ed cor­rec­tions. An edi­tor at the Guardian apol­o­gized and described the arti­cle as a ‘fuck up.’ But the online attacks con­tin­ued. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.–The role of Eddie Snow­den in mis­at­tribut­ing the Shad­ow Bro­kers non-hack to Rus­sia.
2.–Snowden’s fore­shad­ow­ing of the alleged Russ­ian “hack” of the Macron cam­paign”: ” . . . . ‘That could have sig­nif­i­cant for­eign pol­i­cy con­se­quences,’ Snow­den wrote on Twit­ter. ‘Par­tic­u­lar­ly if any of those oper­a­tions tar­get­ed US allies. Par­tic­u­lar­ly if any of those oper­a­tions tar­get­ed elec­tions.’ . . .”
3.–James Bam­ford’s analy­sis of WikiLeaker/Tor promoter/BBG asso­ciate Jacob Apel­baum as the most like­ly source of the Shad­ow Bro­kers non-hack. 
The ludi­crous nature of the “Rus­sia-did it” hypoth­e­sis con­cern­ing the Macron hacks: ” . . . . The hacked doc­u­ments in the ‘Macron hack’ not only con­tained Cyril­lic text in the meta­da­ta, but also con­tained the name of the last per­son to mod­i­fy the doc­u­ments. That name, ‘Rosh­ka Georgiy Petro­vichan’, is an employ­ee at Evri­ka, a large IT com­pa­ny that does work for the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the FSB (Russ­ian intel­li­gence.) Also found in the meta­da­ta is the email of the per­son who uploaded the files to ‘archive.org’, and that email address, frankmacher1@gmx.de, is reg­is­tered with a Ger­man free web­mail provider used pre­vi­ous­ly in 2016 phish­ing attacks against the CDU in Ger­many that have been attrib­uted to APT28. It would appear that the ‘Russ­ian hack­ers’ not only left clues sug­gest­ing it was Russ­ian hack­ers behind the hack, but they decid­ed to name names this time–their own names. . . .”
4.–Neo-Nazi and Glenn Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras asso­ciate Andrew Aueren­heimer’s role in mod­i­fy­ing the doc­u­ments in the Macron hack:  ” . . . . Short­ly after an anony­mous user of the 4chan.org dis­cus­sion forum post­ed fake doc­u­ments pur­port­ing to show Mr. Macron had set up an undis­closed shell com­pa­ny in the Caribbean, the user direct­ed peo­ple to vis­it nouveaumartel.com for updates on the French elec­tion. That web­site, accord­ing to research by web-secu­ri­ty provider Virtualroad.org, is reg­is­tered by ‘Wee­v­los,’ a known online alias of Andrew Auern­heimer, an Amer­i­can hack­er who gained noto­ri­ety three years ago when a U.S. appeals court vacat­ed his con­vic­tion for com­put­er fraud. The site also is host­ed by a serv­er in Latvia that hosts the Dai­ly Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site that iden­ti­fies its admin­is­tra­tor as ‘Weev,’ anoth­er online alias of Mr. Aeurn­heimer, Virtualroad.org says. ‘We strong­ly believe that the fake off­shore doc­u­ments were cre­at­ed by some­one with con­trol of the Dai­ly Stormer serv­er,’ said Tord Lund­ström, a com­put­er foren­sics inves­ti­ga­tor at Virtualroad.org. . . .”
5.–French cyber­se­cu­ri­ty chief Guil­laume Poupard negat­ed the asser­tion that Rus­sia hacked the Macron cam­paign: ” . . . . The head of the French government’s cyber secu­ri­ty agency, which inves­ti­gat­ed leaks from Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron’s elec­tion cam­paign, says they found no trace of a noto­ri­ous Russ­ian hack­ing group behind the attack. . . . ”

FTR #1080 Surveillance Valley, Part 6: Double Agents, Part 2 (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 3)

In this pro­gram, we resume dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of the con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant recent book Sur­veil­lance Val­ley: The Secret Mil­i­tary His­to­ry of the Inter­net by Yasha Levine. In the pre­vi­ous pro­gram, we not­ed, among oth­er points of analy­sis, the deci­sive role of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den in pro­mot­ing the intel­li­gence-agency craft­ed Tor net­work.

In addi­tion to Tor, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund (read “CIA”) helped finance the Sig­nal app for mobile phones. It, too, is fun­da­men­tal­ly com­pro­mised. ” . . . . . . . . The Tor project remained the best-known pri­va­cy app fund­ed by the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, but it was quick­ly joined by anoth­er: Sig­nal, an encrypt­ed mobile phone mes­sag­ing app for the iPhone and Android. . . .”

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the CIA’s Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den was a big pro­mot­er of Sig­nal, as well as Tor: ” . . . . Peo­ple at the ACLU claimed that Sig­nal made fed­er­al agents weep. The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion added Sig­nal along­side Tor to its Sur­veil­lance Self-Defense guide. Fight for the Future, a Sil­i­con Val­ley-fund­ed pri­va­cy activist orga­ni­za­tion, described Sig­nal and Tor as ‘NSA-proof’ and urged peo­ple to use them. Edward Snow­den was the com­bo’s biggest and most famous boost­er and repeat­ed­ly took to Twit­ter to tell his three mil­lion fol­low­ers that he used Sig­nal and Tor every day, and that they should do the same to pro­tect them­selves from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance. ‘Use Tor, Use Sig­nal,’ he tweet­ed out.

“With endorse­ments like these, Sig­nal quick­ly became the go-to app for polit­i­cal activists around the world. Egypt, Rus­sia, Syr­ia, and even the Unit­ed States—millions down­loaded Sig­nal, and it became the com­mu­ni­ca­tion app of choice for those who hoped to avoid police sur­veil­lance. Fem­i­nist col­lec­tives, anti-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump pro­test­ers, com­mu­nists, anar­chists, rad­i­cal ani­mal rights orga­ni­za­tions, Black Lives Mat­ter activists—all flocked to Sig­nal. Many were heed­ing Snow­den’s advice: ‘Orga­nize. Com­part­men­tal­ize to lim­it com­pro­mise. Encrypt every­thing, from calls to texts (use Sig­nal as a first step.)’ . . . .”

Yasha Levine sums up the fun­da­men­tal con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent  in this dynam­ic: ” . . . . If you stepped back to sur­vey the scene, the entire land­scape of this new Inter­net Free­dom pri­va­cy move­ment looked absurd. Cold War-era orga­ni­za­tions spun off from the CIA now fund­ing the glob­al move­ment against gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance? Google and Face­book, com­pa­nies that ran pri­vate sur­veil­lance net­works and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploy­ing gov­ern­ment-fund­ed pri­va­cy tech to pro­tect their users from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance? Pri­va­cy activists work­ing with Sil­i­con Val­ley and the US gov­ern­ment to fight gov­ern­ment surveillance—and with the sup­port of Edward Snow­den him­self? . . . .”

Fol­low­ing Snow­den’s pro­mo­tion of OTF’s Tor and Sig­nal tech­nolo­gies, OTF was at a zenith: ” . . . . After Edward Snow­den, OTF was tri­umphant. It did­n’t men­tion the leak­er by name in its pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als, but it prof­it­ed from the cryp­to cul­ture he pro­mot­ed and ben­e­fit­ed from his direct endorse­ment of the cryp­to tools it financed. It boast­ed that its part­ner­ship with both Sil­i­con Val­ley and respect­ed pri­va­cy activists meant that hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple could use the pri­va­cy tools the US gov­ern­ment had brought to mar­ket. And OTF promised that this was just a start: ‘By lever­ag­ing social net­work effects, we expect to expand to a bil­lion reg­u­lar users tak­ing advan­tage of OTF-sup­port­ed tools and Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies by 2015. . . .’

As even­tu­al­ly became clear, the Tor net­work was eas­i­ly breached. It is a safe bet that the fas­cists grouped around the Pirate Bay site (on which Wik­iLeaks held forth), had breached Tor’s “secre­cy,” in addi­tion to the obvi­ous fact that intel­li­gence ser­vices could pen­e­trate it at will.

With this in mind, John Young’s rumi­na­tion about Wik­iLeaks sound more and more sub­stan­tive.

In all prob­a­bil­i­ty, Wik­iLeaks was a huge data min­ing oper­a­tion both by the very intel­li­gence agen­cies who were osten­si­bly tar­get­ed by Wik­iLeaks, and the Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al net­work around Carl Lund­strom, Daniel Friberg, David Duke et al.

In FTR #‘s 756 and 831 we not­ed Snow­den’s fas­cist views and con­nec­tions. Levine mere­ly char­ac­ter­izes him as a “right-wing lib­er­tar­i­an,” but there is MUCH MORE TO IT THAN  THAT!

Snow­den down­played the fun­da­men­tal role of the Big Tech firms in aid­ing and abet­ting gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, in addi­tion to their own mas­sive sur­veil­lance and resul­tant data min­ing. ” . . . . There, while liv­ing under state pro­tec­tion at an undis­closed loca­tion in Moscow, he swept Sil­i­con Val­ley’s role in Inter­net sur­veil­lance under the rug. Asked about it by Wash­ing­ton Post reporter Bar­ton Gell­man, who had first report­ed on the NSA’s PRISM pro­gram, Snow­den shrugged off the dan­ger posed by com­pa­nies like Google and Face­book. The rea­son? Because pri­vate com­pa­nies do not have the pow­er to arrest, jail, or kill peo­ple. ‘Twit­ter does­n’t put war­heads on fore­heads,’ he joked. . . .”

Embody­ing his “cor­po­ratist” and Tech­no­crat­ic Fas­cist point of view, Snow­den cham­pi­oned the Big Tech firms as bul­warks against gov­ern­ment Inter­net sur­veil­lance, despite the only-too-obvi­ous fact (rein­forced by the doc­u­ments he leaked) that Big Tech is–and always has been–in bed with, and active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ing with, the very gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies con­duct­ing that sur­veil­lance: ” . . . . The only islands of safe­ty were the pri­vate data cen­ters con­trolled by pri­vate companies—Google, Apple, Face­book. These were the cyber-fortress­es and walled cities that offered sanc­tu­ary to the mass­es. In this chaot­ic land­scape, com­put­er engi­neers and cryp­tog­ra­phers played the role of self­less gal­lop­ing knights and wiz­ard-war­riors whose job was to pro­tect the weak folk of the Inter­net: the young, the old and infirm, fam­i­lies. It was their duty to ride out, weapons aloft, and con­vey peo­ple and their pre­cious data safe­ly from fortress to fortress, not let­ting any of the infor­ma­tion fall into the hands of gov­ern­ment spies. He called on them to start a peo­ple’s pri­va­cy war, ral­ly­ing them to go forth and lib­er­ate the Inter­net, to reclaim it from the gov­ern­ments of the world. . . .”

The nau­se­at­ing head of Facebook–Mark Zuckerberg–has decried the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s use of the Inter­net for data min­ing. In FTR #1077, we high­light­ed the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca affair, and Face­book’s full coop­er­a­tion with that project at every turn.

Oth­er Big Tech firms had sim­i­lar reac­tions. “. . . . . ‘We had­n’t even heard of PRISM before yes­ter­day,’ Mark Zucker­berg wrote in a Face­book post. He blamed the gov­ern­ment and posi­tioned Face­book as a vic­tim. “I’ve called Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to express my frus­tra­tion over the dam­age the gov­ern­ment is cre­at­ing for all of our future. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.’ Apple,  Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! All react­ed in much the same way, deny­ing the alle­ga­tions and paint­ing them­selves as the vic­tims of gov­ern­ment over­reach. ‘It’s tremen­dous­ly dis­ap­point­ing that the gov­ern­ment sort of secret­ly did all this stuff and did­n’t tell us. We can’t have a democ­ra­cy if we’re hav­ing to pro­tect you and our users from the gov­ern­ment,’ Lar­ry Page told Char­lie Rose in an inter­view on CBS. . . . .”

We present the con­clu­sion of the main part of the book, with Levine’s sum­ma­tion of the inex­tri­ca­ble nature and sym­bio­sis between the Inter­net, the tech firms and the so-called “pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty.”

The key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of Levine’s book (as a whole) include:

1.–The Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped for counter-insur­gency pur­pos­es.
2.–Big Tech firms net­work with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.
3.–Big Tech firms that data mine their cus­tomers on a near­ly unimag­in­able scale do so as a direct, oper­a­tional exten­sion of the very sur­veil­lance func­tion upon which  the Inter­net is pred­i­cat­ed.
4.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Apple­baum were devel­oped by the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
5.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Inter­net func­tion and the Sig­nal mobile phone app– are read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
6.–The orga­ni­za­tions that pro­mote the alleged virtues of Snow­den, Apple­baum, Tor, Sig­nal et al are linked to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they would have us believe they oppose.
7.–Big Tech firms embrace “Inter­net Free­dom” as a dis­trac­tion from their own will­ful and all-embrac­ing data min­ing and their ongo­ing con­scious col­lab­o­ra­tion with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.

NB: Mr. Levine does not go into the fascis­tic char­ac­ter of Snow­den, Assange, Green­wald et al. Some of those shows: Greenwald–FTR #888, Snowden–FTR #‘s 756, 831, Assange and WikiLeaks–FTR #‘s 732, 745, 755, 917.

“. . . . Then there was the fact that Sig­nal ran on Ama­zon’s servers, which meant that all its data were avail­able to a part­ner in the NSA’s PRISM sur­veil­lance pro­gram. Equal­ly prob­lem­at­ic, Sig­nal need­ed Apple and Google to install and run the app on peo­ple’s mobile phones. Both com­pa­nies were, and as far as we know still are, part­ners in PRISM as well. ‘Google usu­al­ly has root access to the phone, there’s the issue of integri­ty,’ writes Sander Ven­e­ma, a respect­ed devel­op­er and secure—technology train­er, in a blog post explain­ing why he no longer rec­om­mends peo­ple use Sig­nal for encrypt­ed chat. ‘Google is still coop­er­at­ing with the NSA and oth­er intel­li­gence agen­cies. PRISM is also still a thing. I’m pret­ty sure that Google could serve a spe­cial­ly mod­i­fied update or ver­sion of Sig­nal to spe­cif­ic tar­get for sur­veil­lance, and they would be none the wis­er that they installed mal­ware on their phones.’ . . .

. . . . So, although the app encrypt­ed the con­tent of peo­ple’s mes­sages, it also marked them with a flash­ing red sign: ‘Fol­low Me, I Have Some­thing to Hide.’ (Indeed, activists protest­ing at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Philadel­phia in 2016 told me that they were bewil­dered by the fact that police seemed to know and antic­i­pate their every move despite their hav­ing used Sig­nal to orga­nize. . . .”

” . . . . For many Inter­net com­pa­nies, includ­ing Google and Face­book, sur­veil­lance is the busi­ness mod­el. It is the base on which their cor­po­rate and eco­nom­ic pow­er rests. Dis­en­tan­gle sur­veil­lance and prof­it, and these com­pa­nies would col­lapse. Lim­it data col­lec­tion, an the com­pa­nies would see investors flee and their stock prices plum­met. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

“Sil­i­con Val­ley fears a polit­i­cal solu­tion to pri­va­cy. Inter­net Free­dom and cryp­to offer an accept­able alter­na­tive. Tools like Sig­nal and Tor pro­vide a false solu­tion to the pri­va­cy prob­lem, focus­ing people’s atten­tion on gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance and dis­tract­ing them from the pri­vate spy­ing car­ried out by the Inter­net com­pa­nies they use every day. All the while, cryp­to tools give peo­ple a [false] sense that they’re doing some­thing to pro­tect them­selves, a feel­ing of per­son­al empow­er­ment and con­trol. And all those cryp­to rad­i­cals? Well, they just enhance the illu­sion, height­en­ing the impres­sion of risk and dan­ger. With Sig­nal or Tor installed, using an iPhone or Android sud­den­ly becomes edgy and rad­i­cal. So instead of push­ing for polit­i­cal and demo­c­ra­t­ic solu­tions to sur­veil­lance, we out­source our pri­va­cy pol­i­tics to cryp­to apps–software made by the very same pow­er­ful enti­ties that these apps are sup­posed to pro­tect us from. . . .”

FTR #1074 FakeBook: Walkin’ the Snake on the Earth Island with Facebook (FascisBook, Part 2; In Your Facebook, Part 4)

This pro­gram sup­ple­ments past cov­er­age of Face­book in FTR #‘s 718, 946, 1021, 1039 not­ing how Face­book has net­worked with the very Hin­dut­va fas­cist Indi­an ele­ments and OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tions in Ukraine. This net­work­ing has been–ostensibly to com­bat fake news. The real­i­ty may well high­light that the Face­book/B­JP-RSS/OUN/B links gen­er­ates fake news, rather than inter­dict­ing it. The fake news so gen­er­at­ed, how­ev­er, will be to the lik­ing of the fas­cists in pow­er in both coun­tries, man­i­fest­ing as a “Ser­pen­t’s Walk” revi­sion­ist sce­nario.

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include:

1.–Indian pol­i­tics has been large­ly dom­i­nat­ed by fake news, spread by social media: ” . . . . In the con­tin­u­ing Indi­an elec­tions, as 900 mil­lion peo­ple are vot­ing to elect rep­re­sen­ta­tives to the low­er house of the Par­lia­ment, dis­in­for­ma­tion and hate speech are drown­ing out truth on social media net­works in the coun­try and cre­at­ing a pub­lic health cri­sis like the pan­demics of the past cen­tu­ry. This con­ta­gion of a stag­ger­ing amount of mor­phed images, doc­tored videos and text mes­sages is spread­ing large­ly through mes­sag­ing ser­vices and influ­enc­ing what India’s vot­ers watch and read on their smart­phones. A recent study by Microsoft found that over 64 per­cent Indi­ans encoun­tered fake news online, the high­est report­ed among the 22 coun­tries sur­veyed. . . . These plat­forms are filled with fake news and dis­in­for­ma­tion aimed at influ­enc­ing polit­i­cal choic­es dur­ing the Indi­an elec­tions. . . . ”
2.–Narendra Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cist BJP has been the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ry of fake news, and his regime has part­nered with Face­book: ” . . . . The hear­ing was an exer­cise in absur­dist the­ater because the gov­ern­ing B.J.P. has been the chief ben­e­fi­cia­ry of divi­sive con­tent that reach­es mil­lions because of the way social media algo­rithms, espe­cial­ly Face­book, ampli­fy ‘engag­ing’ arti­cles. . . .”
3.–Rajesh Jain is among those BJP func­tionar­ies who serve Face­book, as well as the Hin­dut­va fas­cists: ” . . . . By the time Rajesh Jain was scal­ing up his oper­a­tions in 2013, the BJP’s infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy (IT) strate­gists had begun inter­act­ing with social media plat­forms like Face­book and its part­ner What­sApp. If sup­port­ers of the BJP are to be believed, the par­ty was bet­ter than oth­ers in util­is­ing the micro-tar­get­ing poten­tial of the plat­forms. How­ev­er, it is also true that Facebook’s employ­ees in India con­duct­ed train­ing work­shops to help the mem­bers of the BJP’s IT cell. . . .”
4.–Dr. Hiren Joshi is anoth­er of the BJP oper­a­tives who is heav­i­ly involved with Face­book. ” . . . . Also assist­ing the social media and online teams to build a larg­er-than-life image for Modi before the 2014 elec­tions was a team led by his right-hand man Dr Hiren Joshi, who (as already stat­ed) is a very impor­tant advis­er to Modi whose writ extends way beyond infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and social media. . . . Joshi has had, and con­tin­ues to have, a close and long-stand­ing asso­ci­a­tion with Facebook’s senior employ­ees in India. . . .”
5.–Shivnath Thukral, who was hired by Face­book in 2017 to be its Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Direc­tor for India & South Asia, worked with Joshi’s team in 2014. ” . . . . The third team, that was intense­ly focused on build­ing Modi’s per­son­al image, was head­ed by Hiren Joshi him­self who worked out of the then Gujarat Chief Minister’s Office in Gand­hi­na­gar. The mem­bers of this team worked close­ly with staffers of Face­book in India, more than one of our sources told us. As will be detailed lat­er, Shiv­nath Thukral, who is cur­rent­ly an impor­tant exec­u­tive in Face­book, worked with this team. . . .”
6.–An osten­si­bly remorse­ful BJP politician–Prodyut Bora–highlighted the dra­mat­ic effect of Face­book and its What­sApp sub­sidiary have had on Indi­a’s pol­i­tics: ” . . . . In 2009, social media plat­forms like Face­book and What­sApp had a mar­gin­al impact in India’s 20 big cities. By 2014, how­ev­er, it had vir­tu­al­ly replaced the tra­di­tion­al mass media. In 2019, it will be the most per­va­sive media in the coun­try. . . .”
7.–A con­cise state­ment about the rela­tion­ship between the BJP and Face­book was issued by BJP tech office Vinit Goen­ka: ” . . . . At one stage in our inter­view with [Vinit] Goen­ka that last­ed over two hours, we asked him a point­ed ques­tion: ‘Who helped whom more, Face­book or the BJP?’ He smiled and said: ‘That’s a dif­fi­cult ques­tion. I won­der whether the BJP helped Face­book more than Face­book helped the BJP. You could say, we helped each oth­er.’ . . .”

In Ukraine, as well, Face­book and the OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tions func­tion sym­bi­ot­i­cal­ly:

(Note that the Atlantic Coun­cil is dom­i­nant in the array of indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions con­sti­tut­ing the Ukrain­ian fascist/Facebook coop­er­a­tive effort. We have spo­ken about the Atlantic Coun­cil in numer­ous pro­grams, includ­ing FTR #943. The orga­ni­za­tion has deep oper­a­tional links to ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence, as well as the OUN/B milieu that dom­i­nates the Ukrain­ian dias­po­ra.)

Over­lap­ping cyber­se­cu­ri­ty out­fit Crowd­Strike, the Atlantic Coun­cil has been at the fore­front of the “Rus­sia” was behind the high-pro­file hacks meme:

CrowdStrike–at the epi­cen­ter of the sup­posed Russ­ian hack­ing con­tro­ver­sy is note­wor­thy. Its co-founder and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer, Dmit­ry Alper­ovitch is a senior fel­low at the Atlantic Coun­cil, financed by ele­ments that are at the foun­da­tion of fan­ning the flames of the New Cold War: “In this respect, it is worth not­ing that one of the com­mer­cial cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­nies the gov­ern­ment has relied on is Crowd­strike, which was one of the com­pa­nies ini­tial­ly brought in by the DNC to inves­ti­gate the alleged hacks. . . . Dmitri Alper­ovitch is also a senior fel­low at the Atlantic Coun­cil. . . . The con­nec­tion between [Crowd­strike co-founder and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer Dmitri] Alper­ovitch and the Atlantic Coun­cil has gone large­ly unre­marked upon, but it is rel­e­vant giv­en that the Atlantic Council—which is is fund­ed in part by the US State Depart­ment, NATO, the gov­ern­ments of Latvia and Lithua­nia, the Ukrain­ian World Con­gress, and the Ukrain­ian oli­garch Vic­tor Pinchuk—has been among the loud­est voic­es call­ing for a new Cold War with Rus­sia. As I point­ed out in the pages of The Nation in Novem­ber, the Atlantic Coun­cil has spent the past sev­er­al years pro­duc­ing some of the most vir­u­lent spec­i­mens of the new Cold War pro­pa­gan­da. . . . ”

In May of 2018, Face­book decid­ed to effec­tive­ly out­source the work of iden­ti­fy­ing pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion dur­ing elec­tions to the Atlantic Coun­cil, so choos­ing some­one like Kruk who already has the Atlantic Council’s stamp of approval is in keep­ing with that trend:

” . . . . Face­book is part­ner­ing with the Atlantic Coun­cil in anoth­er effort to com­bat elec­tion-relat­ed pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion from pro­lif­er­at­ing on its ser­vice. The social net­work­ing giant said Thurs­day that a part­ner­ship with the Wash­ing­ton D.C.-based think tank would help it bet­ter spot dis­in­for­ma­tion dur­ing upcom­ing world elec­tions. The part­ner­ship is one of a num­ber of steps Face­book is tak­ing to pre­vent the spread of pro­pa­gan­da and fake news after fail­ing to stop it from spread­ing on its ser­vice in the run up to the 2016 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. . . .”

Since autumn 2018, Face­book has looked to hire a pub­lic pol­i­cy man­ag­er for Ukraine. The job came after years of Ukraini­ans crit­i­ciz­ing the plat­form for take­downs of its activists’ pages and the spread of [alleged] Russ­ian dis­in­fo tar­get­ing Kyiv. Now, it appears to have one: @Kateryna_Kruk.— Christo­pher Miller (@ChristopherJM) June 3, 2019

Katery­na Kruk:

1.–Is Facebook’s Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Man­ag­er for Ukraine as of May of this year, accord­ing to her LinkedIn page.
2.–Worked as an ana­lyst and TV host for the Ukrain­ian ‘anti-Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da’ out­fit Stop­Fake. Stop­Fake is the cre­ation of Ire­na Chalu­pa, who works for the Atlantic Coun­cil and the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and appears to be the sis­ter of Andrea and Alexan­dra Chalu­pa.
3.–Joined the “Krem­lin Watch” team at the Euro­pean Val­ues think-tank, in Octo­ber of 2017.
4.–Received the Atlantic Coun­cil’s Free­dom award for her com­mu­ni­ca­tions work dur­ing the Euro­maid­an protests in June of 2014.
5.–Worked for OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tion Svo­bo­da dur­ing the Euro­maid­an protests. “ . . . ‘There are peo­ple who don’t sup­port Svo­bo­da because of some of their slo­gans, but they know it’s the most active polit­i­cal par­ty and go to them for help, said Svo­bo­da vol­un­teer Katery­na Kruk. . . . ”
6.–Also has a num­ber of arti­cles on the Atlantic Council’s Blog. Here’s a blog post from August of 2018 where she advo­cates for the cre­ation of an inde­pen­dent Ukrain­ian Ortho­dox Church to dimin­ish the influ­ence of the Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church.
7.–According to her LinkedIn page has also done exten­sive work for the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment. From March 2016 to Jan­u­ary 2017 she was the Strate­gic Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er for the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment where she was respon­si­ble for social media and inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions. From Jan­u­ary-April 2017 she was the Head of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at the Min­istry of Health.
8.–Was not only was a vol­un­teer for Svo­bo­da dur­ing the 2014 Euro­maid­an protests, but open­ly cel­e­brat­ed on twit­ter the May 2014 mas­sacre in Odessa when the far right burned dozens of pro­tes­tors alive. Kruk’s twit­ter feed is set to pri­vate now so there isn’t pub­lic access to her old tweet, but peo­ple have screen cap­tures of it. Here’s a tweet from Yasha Levine with a screen­shot of Kruk’s May 2, 2014 tweet where she writes: “#Odessa cleaned itself from ter­ror­ists, proud for city fight­ing for its identity.glory to fall­en heroes..” She even threw in a “glo­ry to fall­en heroes” at the end of her tweet cel­e­brat­ing this mas­sacre. Keep in mind that it was month after this tweet that the Atlantic Coun­cil gave her that Free­dom Award for her com­mu­ni­ca­tions work dur­ing the protests.
9.–In 2014, . . . tweet­ed that a man had asked her to con­vince his grand­son not to join the Azov Bat­tal­ion, a neo-Nazi mili­tia. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I thanked that boy and blessed him.” And he then trav­eled to Luhan­sk to fight pro-Russ­ian rebels.
10.–Lionized a Nazi sniper killed in Ukraine’s civ­il war. In March 2018, a 19-year neo-Nazi named Andriy “Dil­ly” Krivich was shot and killed by a sniper. Krivich had been fight­ing with the fas­cist Ukrain­ian group Right Sec­tor, and had post­ed pho­tos on social media wear­ing Nazi Ger­man sym­bols. After he was killed, Kruk tweet­ed an homage to the teenage Nazi. (The Nazi was also lion­ized on Euro­maid­an Press’ Face­book page.)
11.–Has staunch­ly defend­ed the use of the slo­gan “Sla­va Ukraini,”which was first coined and pop­u­lar­ized by Nazi-col­lab­o­rat­ing fas­cists, and is now the offi­cial salute of Ukraine’s army.
12.–Has also said that the Ukrain­ian fas­cist politi­cian Andriy Paru­biy, who co-found­ed a neo-Nazi par­ty before lat­er becom­ing the chair­man of Ukraine’s par­lia­ment the Rada, is “act­ing smart,” writ­ing, “Paru­biy touche.” . . . .

In the con­text of Face­book’s insti­tu­tion­al lev­el net­work­ing with fas­cists, it is worth not­ing that social media them­selves have been cit­ed as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor to right-wing domes­tic ter­ror­ism. ” . . . The first is sto­chas­tic ter­ror­ism: ‘The use of mass, pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion, usu­al­ly against a par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual or group, which incites or inspires acts of ter­ror­ism which are sta­tis­ti­cal­ly prob­a­ble but hap­pen seem­ing­ly at ran­dom.’ I encoun­tered the idea in a Fri­day thread from data sci­en­tist Emi­ly Gorcens­ki, who used it to tie togeth­er four recent attacks. . . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with review (from FTR #1039) of the psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare strat­e­gy adapt­ed by Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca to the polit­i­cal are­na. Christo­pher Wylie–the for­mer head of research at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca who became one of the key insid­er whis­tle-blow­ers about how Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca oper­at­ed and the extent of Facebook’s knowl­edge about it–gave an inter­view to Cam­paign Mag­a­zine. (We dealt with Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca in FTR #‘s 946, 1021.) Wylie recounts how, as direc­tor of research at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, his orig­i­nal role was to deter­mine how the com­pa­ny could use the infor­ma­tion war­fare tech­niques used by SCL Group – Cam­bridge Analytica’s par­ent com­pa­ny and a defense con­trac­tor pro­vid­ing psy op ser­vices for the British mil­i­tary. Wylie’s job was to adapt the psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare strate­gies that SCL had been using on the bat­tle­field to the online space. As Wylie put it:

“ . . . . When you are work­ing in infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions projects, where your tar­get is a com­bat­ant, the auton­o­my or agency of your tar­gets is not your pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion. It is fair game to deny and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion, coerce and exploit any men­tal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties a per­son has, and to bring out the very worst char­ac­ter­is­tics in that per­son because they are an enemy…But if you port that over to a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem, if you run cam­paigns designed to under­mine people’s abil­i­ty to make free choic­es and to under­stand what is real and not real, you are under­min­ing democ­ra­cy and treat­ing vot­ers in the same way as you are treat­ing ter­ror­ists. . . . .”

Wylie also draws par­al­lels between the psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions used on demo­c­ra­t­ic audi­ences and the bat­tle­field tech­niques used to be build an insur­gency.

FTR #‘s 1061, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1067 and 1068: Socialists for Trump and Hitler (The “Assistance”), Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8

We have won­dered about the ascent of Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez as a polit­i­cal ani­mal. We won­dered whether she might be a “ringer,” ele­vat­ed and pro­mot­ed by the far right and, per­haps, ele­ments of the CIA, because she is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT from their stand­point. In fact, she is straight from the Ama­zon (ahem) mail order cat­a­log: an out­spo­ken Lati­na who fits neat­ly into the anti-Latin big­otry insti­tu­tion­al­ized in Trump’s GOP, brands as a social­ist (per­fect for the Karl Roves and Trumps of this world), has stat­ed her inten­tion to work against Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bents with whose pol­i­cy posi­tions she dis­agrees, and demon­strat­ed a lack of eco­nom­ic sophis­ti­ca­tion in her com­ments about Ama­zon’s failed New York City Deal and in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the Green New Deal.

The ascent of AOC was effect­ed in large mea­sure by two over­lap­ping organizations–Justice Democ­rats and Brand New Congress–both co-found­ed by Saikat Chakrabar­ti, and Indi­an-Amer­i­can, Har­vard-edu­cat­ed, Wall Street and Sil­i­con Val­ley mul­ti-mil­lion­aire, and fan of major Axis col­lab­o­ra­tor Sub­has Chan­dra Bose. Brand New Con­gress was co-found­ed by a Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia-edu­cat­ed Turk­ish Amer­i­can, Cenk Uygur, who has a his­to­ry of deny­ing the Turk­ish geno­cide against the Arme­ni­ans, as we shall see. (Like Har­vard, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia is an Ivy League School.)

The rad­i­cal Demo­c­ra­t­ic new­com­ers are pre­cip­i­tat­ing a war with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, ignor­ing the fact that the Democ­rats retook Con­gress as a result of vic­to­ries by mod­er­ate can­di­dates in dis­tricts tak­en by Trump in 2016.

Chakrabar­ti is fun­da­men­tal to the rise of Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez. Chakrabar­ti was AOC’s cam­paign man­ag­er and is her cur­rent chief of staff. Both Jus­tice Democ­rats and Brand New Con­gress donat­ed a total of $900,000 to a con­sult­ing firm also head­ed by Chakrabar­ti. Until recent­ly, AOC sat on the board of one of them.

In a recent twit­ter video post defend­ing AOC’s mer­cu­r­ial social media activ­i­ty, Chakrabar­ti appeared with a T‑Shirt fea­tur­ing a pic­ture of Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, an Indi­an nation­al­ist who allied him­self with both Nazi Ger­many and Impe­r­i­al Japan. He has a habit of wear­ing Sub­has Chan­dra Bose garb.

Some of Bose’s many pro­found rela­tion­ships and oper­a­tional deeds in con­nec­tion with the Axis and the Sec­ond World War:

1.–In addi­tion to net­work­ing with Hein­rich Himm­ler, as pic­tured above, left, he met with Adolf Hitler and was praised by Der Fuhrer. ” . . . . You are for­tu­nate hav­ing been born in a coun­try of glo­ri­ous cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and a colos­sal man­pow­er. I am impressed by the burn­ing pas­sion with which you and your Neta­ji [Bose] seek to lib­er­ate your coun­try from for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Your Neta­ji’s sta­tus is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 mil­lion Ger­mans, he is the leader of 400 mil­lion Indi­ans. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater gen­er­al than myself. I salute him, and Ger­many salutes him. It is the duty of all Indi­ans to accept him as their führer and obey him implic­it­ly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guid­ance will lead India very soon to free­dom.”
2.–Bose net­worked with SS chief Hein­rich Himm­ler and, ulti­mate­ly, his Euro­pean fight­ing forces were fold­ed into the Waf­fen SS: ” . . . . The Indi­an Legion (Ger­man: Indis­che Legion), offi­cial­ly the Free India Legion (Ger­man: Legion Freies Indi­en) or Infantry Reg­i­ment 950 (Indi­an) (Ger­man: Infan­terie-Reg­i­ment 950 (indis­ches), I.R. 950) and lat­er the Indi­an Vol­un­teer Legion of the Waf­fen-SS (Ger­man: Indis­che Frei­willi­gen Legion der Waf­fen-SS), was a mil­i­tary unit raised dur­ing the Sec­ond World War in Nazi Ger­many. Intend­ed to serve as a lib­er­a­tion force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war and expa­tri­ates in Europe. Because of its ori­gins in the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Ini­tial­ly raised as part of the Ger­man Army, it was part of the Waf­fen-SS from August 1944. Indi­an inde­pen­dence leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose ini­ti­at­ed the legion’s for­ma­tion, as part of his efforts to win Indi­a’s inde­pen­dence by wag­ing war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seek­ing Ger­man aid. . . .”
3.–Bose net­worked with Mus­soli­ni, Prime Min­is­ter Hide­ki Tojo and even Emper­or Hiro­hi­to him­self dur­ing the course of his align­ment with the Axis: ” . . . . Hav­ing met with Hitler, Ital­ian Fas­cist Duce Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, and Japan­ese Pre­mier Gen­er­al Hide­ki Tojo, Bose was, at one time or anoth­er, backed by all three of the major Axis pow­ers. . . . Like Il Duce and the Führer before him, Bose now claimed the mul­ti­ple titles and offices of head of state, prime min­is­ter, min­is­ter of war, and head of the for­eign office. On the 23rd, the new chief exec­u­tive offi­cer made a state vis­it to Japan’s Emper­or Hiro­hi­to dur­ing the Greater East Asia Con­fer­ence in Tokyo . . . .”
4.–Bose also wrote for the jour­nal of pan-Ger­man­ist philoso­pher Karl Haushofer. Kevin Coogan notes the phi­los­o­phy of Karl Haushofer, an ear­ly influ­ence on Hitler and Third Reich geo-pol­i­tics, exem­pli­fy­ing some of the his­tor­i­cal gen­e­sis of the Nazi/Hindu nation­al­ist link. ” . . . . In the 1930’s, Indi­an nation­al­ist leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose [whose Indi­an nation­al Army lat­er received mil­i­tary sup­port in World War II from both Ger­many and Japan] was a cor­re­spon­dent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopoli­tik. [Haushofer­’s pub­li­ca­tion.] . . . .”
5.–In addi­tion to Haushofer,  Bose net­worked with oth­er the­o­ret­i­cal lumi­nar­ies of fas­cism and insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als involved with clan­des­tine oper­a­tions and intel­li­gence mat­ters, includ­ing: The Japan­ese Black Drag­on Soci­ety and its patri­arch Mit­su­ru Toya­ma, Abwehr head Wil­helm Canaris, Haj Amin El-Hus­sei­ni (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Major Gen­er­al in the Waf­fen SS, the fore­most orga­niz­er of Mus­lim com­bat units for the Nazis and the first leader of the Pales­tin­ian Nation­al Move­ment) and Nazi Pro­pa­gan­da Min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels.
6.–In con­nec­tion with his work for Goebbels, it is worth not­ing that Bose’s Axis pro­pa­gan­da broad­casts were coun­tered with George Orwell’s broad­casts for the Allies: ” . . . . . Bose set up the Free India Cen­ter in Berlin and began radio broad­casts from Nauen, Ger­many, to his far-off home­land on Feb­ru­ary 19, 1942. Bose’s British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion rival and coun­ter­part, author Eric Blair (aka George Orwell of Ani­mal Farm and 1984 fame), led the Allied pro­pa­gan­da team that fought Bose over the radio. . . . ”

It should be not­ed that Bose was not one of the Hin­dut­va fas­cists, who belonged to the RSS and the close­ly-allied Hin­du Mahasab­ha. He was, how­ev­er, an Axis-allied fas­cist mil­i­tary leader, like some oth­er nation­al­ists in colo­nial ter­ri­to­ries, who sought alliance with the armies of Nazi Ger­many, Impe­r­i­al Japan and, to a less­er extent, fas­cist Italy as vehi­cles for oust­ing their colo­nial mas­ters.

Bose appears to have faked his 1945 death in a plane crash. If so, the prob­a­bil­i­ty is high that he con­tin­ued his polit­i­cal work under­ground, very pos­si­bly in con­nec­tion with some of the Axis ele­ments with which he was asso­ci­at­ed dur­ing the war, and/or ele­ments of CIA or oth­er intel­li­gence ser­vices. ” . . . . Although Neta­ji (Great Leader) Bose was report­ed killed in an air crash in August 1945 . . . . many believed then and con­tin­ue to believe now that, helped by his Japan­ese allies, he faked his death . . . . and returned to India many years lat­er . . . . In his inquiry report, com­plet­ed in 2006, Jus­tice Mukher­jee was cat­e­goric. He con­clud­ed: ‘Neta­ji Bose is dead [a safe bet as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged and the ash­es in the Japan­ese tem­ple in Tokyo [main­tained by the Indi­an gov­ern­ment since 1945] are not of Neta­ji.’ . . .”

Cenk Uygur–the Ivy-League edu­cat­ed co-founder (with Chakrabar­ti) of Brand New Con­gress, has a his­to­ry of deny­ing the Turk­ish geno­cide of Arme­ni­ans dur­ing World War I: ” . . . . . . . . Hence, once you real­ly exam­ine the his­to­ry of the time it becomes appar­ent that the alle­ga­tions of an Armen­ian Geno­cide are unfound­ed. So the ques­tion aris­es of why the Arme­ni­ans would both­er to con­jure up such sto­ries . . . . . . . every non-Armen­ian schol­ar in the field believes it is an open ques­tion whether this event was a geno­cide. Is it the claim of the arti­cle that all of these peo­ple are taint­ed by the ten­ta­cles of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment? If not, then why is it not point­ed out that no one out­side of the ‘Armen­ian posi­tion’ believes it is a geno­cide? . . . ”

We note that, in addi­tion to man­i­fest­ing mate­r­i­al sup­port­ive of the World War II Axis and deny­ing geno­cide, the Chakrabarti/Uygur team has engi­neered much that fits neat­ly into the GOP strat­e­gy. The “war” they plan on “lean­ing into” with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty ben­e­fits Trump/GOP/Karl Rove and might just as well have been script­ed by them. ” . . . . it is the Jus­tice Democ­rats who see Oca­sio-Cortez as just the open­ing act in an aston­ish­ing­ly ambi­tious plan to do noth­ing less than re-imag­ine lib­er­al pol­i­tics in America—and do it by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary. . . . If that requires knock­ing out well-known elect­ed offi­cials and replac­ing them with more rad­i­cal new­com­ers, so be it. And if it ends up rip­ping apart the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in the process—well, that might be the idea.  ‘There is going to be a war with­in the par­ty. We are going to lean into it,’ said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .” 

With “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti and “What Armen­ian Geno­cide?” Uygur pro­mot­ing her polit­i­cal ascent, we should note how much of what she says is per­fect for Team Trump. AOC has intoned that jobs should be pro­vid­ed for peo­ple “unwill­ing to work,” that cap­i­tal­ism was “irre­deemable” and adorned the fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant con­cept of a “Green New Deal” with a pro­gres­sive wish list that pro­vid­ed pro­pa­gan­da fod­der for Team Trump.

Brad Parscale is head­ing Trump’s 2020 reelec­tion team and, in so doing, has reassem­bled the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca team from 2016. AOC has long been pro­lif­ic in her use of social media and online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We won­der if AOC may have been iden­ti­fied, pro­filed and data-based by an AI-assist­ed data min­ing oper­a­tion along the lines of what Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca engi­neered on behalf of Trump dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign?

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Bernie Sanders’ chief 2016 cam­paign strate­gist Tad Devine’s net­work­ing with Trump’s 2016 cam­paign man­ag­er and prob­a­ble spook Paul Man­afort on the ear­ly stages of the Maid­an “op;” the promi­nent role in the Sanders Insti­tute and AOC’s advi­so­ry team of Jef­frey Sachs, whose HIID team of advis­ers (with gov­ern­ment fund­ing) sent Rus­sia back to the Stone Age, eco­nom­i­cal­ly; the “hand­off” to Jef­frey Sachs and his HIID of Rus­sia and oth­er for­mer Sovi­et Republics by the Gehlen/GOP Nazis man­i­fest­ing through the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion; Sachs’ role in craft­ing the oli­garch sys­tem that bedev­ils the for­mer Sovi­et mem­ber states to this day; review of Sanders Insti­tute mem­ber Tul­si Gab­bard’s links to Naren­dra Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cists and the Hare Krish­na fas­cist mind con­trol cult; Tul­si Gab­bard’s fund­ing from a group seen by crit­ics as a Hin­dut­va-sup­port­ing enti­ty in the U.S.; Tul­si Gab­bard’s posi­tion on the advi­so­ry board of Koch-Broth­ers fund­ed think tank that over­laps the Neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment; GOP’s strat­e­gy of using “oppor­tu­ni­ty zones” des­ig­nat­ed in the Trump Tax Bill as a cam­paign strat­e­gy; AOC’s pos­si­ble use in the GOP cam­paign strat­e­gy using “oppor­tu­ni­ty zones;” AOC’s clum­sy use of “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti and “What Armen­ian Geno­cide? “Uygur’s PACs, as well as a con­sult­ing firm run by Chakrabar­ti; review of the Anan­da Mar­ga cult, found­ed and run by Bose’s nephew, room­mate and polit­i­cal pro­tege Sarkar; Ama­zon’s Jeff Bezos’ fam­i­ly her­itage with DARPA and the CIA’s Oper­a­tion Peter Pan; dis­cus­sion of H.L. Hunt Grand­daugh­ter Leah Hunt-Hen­drix’s sig­nif­i­cant role in fund­ing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s left; Hunt-Hen­drix’s asso­ci­a­tion with Glo­ria Steinem, whose CIA her­itage we have dis­cussed in the past; the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Chakrabar­ti may be man­i­fest­ing Sub­has Chan­dra Bose garb as part of his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, por­tray­ing the Axis as anti-colo­nial lib­er­a­tors; rumi­na­tion about the ele­va­tion of Bernie Sanders, AOC et al as part of an Under­ground Reich gam­bit to use anti-com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca.