The “Mulan” Furor (Fuehrer?): Spooks, Fascists, Nazis and “The New York Times”

In pre­vi­ous pro­grams, we have not­ed that the Uyghur “inde­pen­dence” move­ment is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence, as well as a pot­pour­ri of fas­cists of var­i­ous stripes. A “New York Times” arti­cle posi­tions Adri­an Zenz as an author­i­ty on the Uyghurs. Zen­z’s promi­nence as an “expert” on the Uyghurs comes by virtue of his posi­tion with the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, ” . . . . an out­growth of the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee, a group found­ed by Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist Lev Dobri­an­sky to lob­by against any effort for detente with the Sovi­et Union. Its co-chair­man, Yaroslav Stet­sko, was a top leader of the fas­cist OUN‑B mili­tia that fought along­side Nazi Ger­many dur­ing its occu­pa­tion of Ukraine in World War Two. . . .” OUN/B’s founder was Stepan Ban­dera, pic­tured at right. Just as the Net­work of Chi­nese Human Rights Defend­ers based their report on inter­views with eight indi­vid­u­als out of a pop­u­la­tion of 20 mil­lion, Zenz based his esti­mate on a sin­gle report by a TV sta­tion that broad­casts mate­r­i­al from Al-Qae­da and ISIS-linked ele­ments and indi­vid­u­als: ” . . . . Zenz arrived at his esti­mate ‘over 1 mil­lion’ in a dubi­ous man­ner. He based it on a sin­gle report by Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur exile media orga­ni­za­tion based in Turkey . . . . Far from an impar­tial jour­nal­is­tic orga­ni­za­tion, Istiqlal TV advances the sep­a­ratist cause while play­ing host to an assort­ment of extrem­ist fig­ures. One such char­ac­ter who often appears on Istiqlal TV is Abdulka­dir Yapuquan, a report­ed leader of the East Turkestan Islam­ic Move­ment (ETIM), a sep­a­ratist group that aims to estab­lish an inde­pen­dent home­land in Xin­jiang called East Turkestan. . . . ETIM has been des­ig­nat­ed as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion with ties to al-Qae­da by the US, Euro­pean Union, and UN Secu­ri­ty Council’s Al-Qai­da Sanc­tions Com­mit­tee. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press has report­ed that since ‘2013, thou­sands of Uighurs… have trav­eled to Syr­ia to train with the Uighur mil­i­tant group Turk­istan Islam­ic Par­ty and fight along­side al-Qai­da,’ with ‘sev­er­al hun­dred join[ing] the Islam­ic State.’ . . .”

FTR #1145 The Uyghurs and the Destabilization of China, Part 3

This pro­gram con­tin­ues dis­cus­sion of the Uyghurs/“Uighurs” and the desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na. This ongo­ing effort is one of an array of covert and overt oper­a­tions against Chi­na.

Dis­cussed in numer­ous pro­grams, the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) are heav­i­ly over­lapped with var­i­ous fas­cist ele­ments. All of these are present in the his­to­ry of the World Uyghur Con­gress.

1.–The nar­co-fas­cist regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek.
2.–The Grey Wolves, youth wing of the Nation­al Action Par­ty. The group was a key ele­ment of the Turk­ish “Stay Behind” move­ment.
3.–Various Islam­ic ter­ror­ist off­shoots of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, includ­ing Al-Qae­da and the Islam­ic State.
4.–The Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations milieu, direct­ly evolved from the Third Reich and the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion.
5.–The Dalai Lama and his SS/Third Reich her­itage.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance, once again, is the deci­sive pres­ence of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out found­ed by William Casey.

Amer­i­can and West­ern media draw on an Amer­i­can regime-change oper­a­tion for much of their coverage–that orga­ni­za­tion is the World Uyghur [“Uighur”] Con­gress and numer­ous sub­sidiary ele­ments.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the WUC milieu is Rushan Abas: ” . . . . Anoth­er influ­en­tial orga­ni­za­tion spun out of the WUC net­work is the Cam­paign for Uyghurs. This group is head­ed by Rushan Abbas, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the UAA. Pro­mot­ed sim­ply as a Uyghur ‘human rights activist’ by West­ern media out­lets includ­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly adver­sar­i­al Democ­ra­cy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a long­time US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary oper­a­tive. Abbas boasts in her bio of her ‘exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with US gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Home­land Secu­ri­ty, Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of State, and var­i­ous US intel­li­gence agen­cies.’ While work­ing for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tor L3 Tech­nolo­gies, Abbas served the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush administration’s so-called war on ter­ror as a ‘con­sul­tant at Guan­tanamo Bay sup­port­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom.’ Abbas ‘also worked as a lin­guist and trans­la­tor for sev­er­al fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing work for the US State Depart­ment in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba and for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer First Lady Lau­ra Bush’. Like so many of her col­leagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia. While Abbas once shared her his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US gov­ern­ment in the open, she has attempt­ed to scrub bio­graph­ic infor­ma­tion from her online pres­ence fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous pub­lic­i­ty appear­ance in Decem­ber 2019. Dur­ing a Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Any­thing’ ques­tion and answer forum, par­tic­i­pants blast­ed Abbas as a ‘CIA asset’ and fre­quent US gov­ern­ment col­lab­o­ra­tor, prompt­ing her attempt to dis­ap­pear her bio from the inter­net. . . .”

The osten­si­bly “peace­ful’ intent of the WUC can be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of the com­ments of for­mer WUC Vice-Pres­i­dent Sey­it Tum­turk: ” . . . . In 2018, Tüm­turk declared that Chi­nese Uyghurs view Turk­ish ‘state requests as orders.’ He then pro­claimed that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turk­ish army and join Turkey’s ille­gal and bru­tal inva­sion of North­ern Syr­ia ‘to fight for God’ – if ordered to do so by Erdo­gan. . . . Short­ly after Tumturk’s com­ments, Uyghur mil­i­tants dressed in Turk­ish mil­i­tary fatigues and on the Turk­ish side of the Syr­i­an bor­der released a video in which they threat­ened to wage war against Chi­na: ‘Lis­ten you dog bas­tards, do you see this? We will tri­umph!’ one fight­er exclaimed. ‘We will kill you all. Lis­ten up Chi­nese civil­ians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warn­ing you. We shall return and we will be vic­to­ri­ous.’ . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the polit­i­cal his­to­ry of William Casey, on whose watch as CIA direc­tor many of the U.S. intel­li­gence fronts involved with the Uyghur desta­bi­liza­tion effort were devel­oped.

Key Aspects of Analy­sis of Casey Include: Casey’s Wall Street legal back­ground and the man­ner in which it dove­tailed with William Dono­van and the OSS (Amer­i­ca’s World War II intel­li­gence ser­vice); Casey’s net­work­ing with Lands­dale and oth­ers involved with the recov­ery of Gold­en Lily loot, in the Philip­pines, in par­tic­u­lar; Casey’s pos­si­ble role as a key imple­menter of the Black Eagle Fund; Casey’s role in set­ting up Cap­i­tal Cities, a com­pa­ny that even­tu­al­ly bought ABC in 1985; Casey’s posi­tion as Cap­i­tal Cities’ largest stock­hold­er, includ­ing in 1985, when he was CIA direc­tor; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Cap­i­tal Cities was an intel­li­gence front; Casey’s key posi­tions in the Nixon Administration–Chairman of the SEC, Under Sec­re­tary of State for Eco­nom­ic Affairs and head of the Export-Import Bank; the prob­a­bil­i­ty that Casey was with CIA through­out his post-World War II career; Casey’s friend­ship with both Allen and John Fos­ter Dulles; Casey’s knowl­edge of how to “pri­va­tize” the CIA; Casey’s role as the han­dler of Fer­di­nand Mar­cos and his Gold­en Lily bul­lion; Rea­gan’s sign­ing of Exec­u­tive Order 12333, autho­riz­ing the CIA to enter into pri­vate rela­tion­ships with PMF’s (pri­vate mil­i­tary foun­da­tions) for intel­li­gence pur­pos­es, while per­mit­ting those rela­tion­ships to be kept secret.

FTR #1144 The Uyghurs and the Destabilization of China, Part 2

The pro­gram begins with review of Nazi/Gehlen/ABN links to anti-Chi­na efforts in Hong Kong and Xin­jiang province.

In numer­ous pro­grams, we have not­ed inter­na­tion­al net­work­ing between the Ukrain­ian Nazi Azov Bat­tal­ion and ele­ments around the world:

Azov is part of the “Inter­mar­i­um Revival” that is seen as using Naz­i­fi­ca­tion of the Ukraine “piv­ot point” as a spring­board for a glob­al Nazi takeover.
Amer­i­can Nazis and white suprema­cists are among the ele­ments net­work­ing with Azov and then “bring­ing it all back home” to their native lands.
Azov Bat­tal­ion and Pravy Sek­tor (“Right Sec­tor”) ele­ments have decamped to Hong Kong, net­work­ing with the so-called “Pro-Democ­ra­cy” forces and work­ing on behalf of EU NGOs. This was dis­cussed in FTR #1103.

Azov’s Hong Kong com­pa­tri­ots have adopt­ed the OUN/B slo­gan, now the offi­cial salute of the Ukrain­ian police and mil­i­tary. ” . . . . The inter­est has been mutu­al, with Hong Kong’s ‘democ­rats’ draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from Ukraine’s pro-West­ern Euro­maid­an ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ that has empow­ered far-right, fascis­tic forces. Hong Kong pro­test­ers have embraced the slo­gan ‘Glo­ry to Hong Kong’, adapt­ed from ‘Sla­va Ukrayi­ni’ or ‘Glo­ry to Ukraine’, a slo­gan invent­ed by Ukrain­ian fas­cists and used by Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors dur­ing WWII that was re-pop­u­lar­ized by the Euro­maid­an move­ment. . . . ”

Joshua Wong–“boy won­der” and dar­ling of the Amer­i­can MSM–has dou­bled down on affin­i­ty with Ukraine: ” . . . . ‘No mat­ter the dif­fer­ences between Ukraine and Hong Kong, our fights for free­dom and democ­ra­cy are the same,’ Joshua Wong told The Kyiv Post in 2019. ‘[W]e have to learn from Ukraini­ans… and show sol­i­dar­i­ty. Ukraine con­front­ed the force of Rus­sia — we are fac­ing the force of Bei­jing.’ . . . .”

The Hong Kong iter­a­tion of the OUN/UPA salute has become an anthem. In its cov­er­age of the ban­ning of that song by the Chi­nese author­i­ties, The New York Times [pre­dictably] fails to dis­cuss the her­itage of the slogan/song, nor the nature of the Ukrain­ian Nazi “trou­ba­dours” who brought it to Hong Kong.

In this con­text, it is impor­tant to remem­ber that the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democracy–a U.S. intel­li­gence “cut-out” found­ed by for­mer CIA direc­tor William Casey–has helped finance the “pro-Democ­ra­cy” forces in Hong Kong.

One of the lead­ing pro­pa­gan­dists con­cern­ing “mass incar­cer­a­tion of the Uighurs” is Adri­an Zenz, a dog­mat­ic End Times Chris­t­ian, Ger­man nation­al and “senior fel­low in Chi­na stud­ies at the far-right Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, which was estab­lished by the US gov­ern­ment in 1983.”

The Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion is an off­shoot of the milieu of the OUN/B. ” . . . . an out­growth of the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee, a group found­ed by Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist Lev Dobri­an­sky to lob­by against any effort for detente with the Sovi­et Union. Its co-chair­man, Yaroslav Stet­sko, was a top leader of the fas­cist OUN‑B mili­tia that fought along­side Nazi Ger­many dur­ing its occu­pa­tion of Ukraine in World War Two. . . .” A key fig­ure in the Azov Bat­tal­ion (ele­ments of which were present in Hong Kong) is Roman Zvarych, the per­son­al sec­re­tary for Stet­sko in the ear­ly 1980’s.

” . . . . for­mer­ly Yaroslav Stetsko’s pri­vate sec­re­tary, the U.S.-born Roman Zvarych (1953), rep­re­sents a younger gen­er­a­tion of the Ukrain­ian émi­gré com­mu­ni­ty active dur­ing the Cold War and a direct link from the ABN to the Azov Bat­tal­ion. . . . Zvarych par­tic­i­pat­ed in the activ­i­ties of the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations in the 1980s. . . . In Feb­ru­ary 2005, after Vik­tor Yushchenko’s elec­tion, Zvarych was appoint­ed Min­is­ter of Jus­tice. . . . Accord­ing to Andriy Bilet­sky, the first com­man­der of the Azov bat­tal­ion, a civ­il para­mil­i­tary unit cre­at­ed in the wake of the Euro­maid­an, Zvarych was head of the head­quar­ters of the Azov Cen­tral Com­mit­tee in 2015 and sup­port­ed the Azov bat­tal­ion with ‘vol­un­teers’ and polit­i­cal advice through his Zvarych Foun­da­tion. . . .”

Net­work­ing with Isa Yusuf Alptekin at the Ban­dung (Indone­sia) con­fer­ence was Ruzi (or “Ruzy”) Nazar, an Uzbek nation­al who fought in var­i­ous Third Reich mil­i­tary for­ma­tions, includ­ing the SS Dirlewanger Brigade. After the war, Nazar was a CIA oper­a­tive net­work­ing with the Nation­al Action Par­ty (or Nation­al Move­ment Par­ty) of Alparslan Turkes.

Nazar rep­re­sent­ed the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations at the 1984 WACL con­fer­ence in Dal­las.

Dis­cussed in numer­ous pro­grams, the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) are heav­i­ly over­lapped with var­i­ous fas­cist ele­ments. All of these are present in the his­to­ry of the World Uyghur Con­gress.

1.–The nar­co-fas­cist regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek.
2.–The Grey Wolves, youth wing of the Nation­al Action Par­ty. The group was a key ele­ment of the Turk­ish “Stay Behind” move­ment.
3.–Various Islam­ic ter­ror­ist off­shoots of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, includ­ing Al-Qae­da and the Islam­ic State.
4.–As seen above, the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations milieu, direct­ly evolved from the Third Reich and the Gehlen orga­ni­za­tion.
5.–The SS/CIA/Third Reich milieu of the Dalai Lama.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance, once again, is the deci­sive pres­ence of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy, a U.S. intel­li­gence cut-out found­ed by William Casey.

Amer­i­can and West­ern media draw on an Amer­i­can regime-change oper­a­tion for much of their coverage–that orga­ni­za­tion is the World Uyghur [“Uighur”] Con­gress and numer­ous sub­sidiary ele­ments.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the WUC milieu is Rushan Abas: ” . . . . Anoth­er influ­en­tial orga­ni­za­tion spun out of the WUC net­work is the Cam­paign for Uyghurs. This group is head­ed by Rushan Abbas, the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the UAA. Pro­mot­ed sim­ply as a Uyghur ‘human rights activist’ by West­ern media out­lets includ­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly adver­sar­i­al Democ­ra­cy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a long­time US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary oper­a­tive. Abbas boasts in her bio of her ‘exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with US gov­ern­ment agen­cies, includ­ing Home­land Secu­ri­ty, Depart­ment of Defense, Depart­ment of State, and var­i­ous US intel­li­gence agen­cies.’ While work­ing for the mil­i­tary con­trac­tor L3 Tech­nolo­gies, Abbas served the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush administration’s so-called war on ter­ror as a ‘con­sul­tant at Guan­tanamo Bay sup­port­ing Oper­a­tion Endur­ing Free­dom.’ Abbas ‘also worked as a lin­guist and trans­la­tor for sev­er­al fed­er­al agen­cies includ­ing work for the US State Depart­ment in Guan­tanamo Bay, Cuba and for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer First Lady Lau­ra Bush’. Like so many of her col­leagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia. While Abbas once shared her his­to­ry of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US gov­ern­ment in the open, she has attempt­ed to scrub bio­graph­ic infor­ma­tion from her online pres­ence fol­low­ing a dis­as­trous pub­lic­i­ty appear­ance in Decem­ber 2019. Dur­ing a Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Any­thing’ ques­tion and answer forum, par­tic­i­pants blast­ed Abbas as a ‘CIA asset’ and fre­quent US gov­ern­ment col­lab­o­ra­tor, prompt­ing her attempt to dis­ap­pear her bio from the inter­net. . . .”

The osten­si­bly “peace­ful’ intent of the WUC can be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of the com­ments of for­mer WUC Vice-Pres­i­dent Sey­it Tum­turk: ” . . . . In 2018, Tüm­turk declared that Chi­nese Uyghurs view Turk­ish ‘state requests as orders.’ He then pro­claimed that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turk­ish army and join Turkey’s ille­gal and bru­tal inva­sion of North­ern Syr­ia “to fight for God” – if ordered to do so by Erdo­gan. . . . Short­ly after Tumturk’s com­ments, Uyghur mil­i­tants dressed in Turk­ish mil­i­tary fatigues and on the Turk­ish side of the Syr­i­an bor­der released a video in which they threat­ened to wage war against Chi­na: ‘Lis­ten you dog bas­tards, do you see this? We will tri­umph!’ one fight­er exclaimed. ‘We will kill you all. Lis­ten up Chi­nese civil­ians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warn­ing you. We shall return and we will be vic­to­ri­ous.’ . . .”

FTR #1125 Three-Dimensional Chess and the Covid-19 Outbreak: A Structural Overview

“A nation of sheep will beget a gov­ern­ment of wolves.”–Edward R. Mur­row

This pro­gram is an overview of a num­ber of over­lap­ping con­sid­er­a­tions in the Covid-19 out­break, which Mr. Emory calls a “Bio-Psy-Op.” These over­lap­ping areas will be pre­sent­ed in a series of pro­grams: FTR #1126 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 2: The Democ­ra­cy-Killing Virus; FTR #1127 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 3: The Eugenic Virus; FTR #1128 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 4: The Wealth-Con­cen­trat­ing Virus; FTR #1129 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 5: Walkin’ the Coro­n­avirus; FTR #1130 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 6: Context–The Chi­na-Killing Virus; FTR #1131 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse, Part 7: Pinch­back­’s Per­spec­tive and FTR #1132 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 8: The Nazi Virus.

Before dis­cussing the Covid-19 “op,” per se, we memo­ri­al­ized the bril­liant Kevin Coogan, author of “Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al,” as well as numer­ous arti­cles. Kevin passed away on 2/27/2020 in New York City. We do not know the cause. Kevin was a bril­liant writer and ana­lyst and will be sore­ly missed.

In For The Record #233, we exam­ined Kev­in’s analy­sis of “The Order,” a fascist/mystical con­cept that was for­mu­lat­ed, in part by fas­cist mys­tic Julius Evola. Evola was a dom­i­nant philo­soph­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal influ­ence on Steve Ban­non, at the epi­cen­ter of the anti-Chi­na effort. (Mr. Emory mis­spoke himself–the pro­gram is FTR #233, not #312.)

The con­cept of three-dimen­sion­al chess derives from the old “Star Trek” tele­vi­sion series, in which the offi­cers played a vari­a­tion of chess that involved play­ing on three dif­fer­ent lev­els. Under­stand­ing the “Bio-Psy-Op” sim­i­lar­ly involves think­ing and aware­ness on at least three lev­els.

An op-ed col­umn in The New York Times by Bret Stephens goes to the essence of this “bio-psy-op.” ” . . . . The only cer­tain­ty is that, in the midst of a cri­sis, politi­cians are rarely penal­ized for pre­dict­ing the worst pos­si­ble out­come. If it comes to pass, they seem prophet­ic. If it doesn’t, they take cred­it for avert­ing cat­a­stro­phe. In the mean­time, they seek to enhance their pow­ers. . . . we might face not a reces­sion but a full-blown depres­sion, which would be finan­cial­ly ruinous for hun­dreds of mil­lions and have its own dis­as­trous knock-on effects in men­tal, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal health, includ­ing for the elder­ly and sick who already face the great­est risks from the virus. . . .”

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis, which will be devel­oped at much greater length and in much greater detail in the series of pro­grams not­ed above, includ­ing some of the arti­cles which will fig­ure into the analy­sis:

1.–Exemplifying the pro­found psy­cho­log­i­cal aspects of the Covid-19 Psy-Op is the phe­nom­e­non of the hoard­ing of toi­let paper. Mr. Emory views this as a deep Freudian/anal response to feel­ings of help­less­ness on the part of cit­i­zens. Toi­let paper is of no help against the virus, but is symp­to­matic of a deep-seat­ed per­son­al­i­ty dynam­ic seek­ing to man­i­fest some mea­sure of social con­trol. This was the sub­ject of a recent New York­er piece. ” . . . . ‘Con­trol­ling clean­li­ness around B.M.s is the ear­li­est way the child asserts con­trol,’ Andrea Green­man, the pres­i­dent of the Con­tem­po­rary Freudi­an Soci­ety, said. ‘The fact that now we are all pre­sum­ably los­ing con­trol cre­ates a regres­sive push to a very ear­ly time. So, I guess that trans­lates in the uncon­scious to ‘If I have a life­long sup­ply of toi­let paper, I’ll nev­er be out of con­trol, nev­er be a help­less, dirty child again.’ ’ . . . .”

2.–FTR #1126 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 2: The Democ­ra­cy-Killing Virus: The Covid-19 “op” is lead­ing to the atten­u­a­tion or elim­i­na­tion of democ­ra­cy all over the world. In addi­tion to dra­con­ian pow­ers pro­posed by “ex” CIA offi­cer and Attor­ney Gen­er­al William Barr, Trump has boast­ed about pow­ers grant­ed to him “that peo­ple don’t even know about.” Abroad, fas­cists and auto­crats from Vik­tor Orban to Naren­dra Modi are using the Covid-19 out­break to cement con­trol. Even Great Britain has man­i­fest­ed emer­gency pow­ers that one crit­ic termed “Eye-Water­ing.” Civ­il lib­er­ties are tak­ing a beat­ing, with “Pan­dem­ic Sur­veil­lance” enabling a mas­sive ero­sion of pri­va­cy that is unlike­ly to abate. There are ques­tions about whether the elec­tions will be held in Novem­ber. (“Trump Has Emer­gency Pow­ers We Aren’t Allowed to Know About” by Eliz­a­beth Gotein and Andrew Boyle; The New York Times; 4/10/2020.; “DOJ seeks new emer­gency pow­ers amid coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic” by Bet­sy Woodruff Swan; Politi­co; 03/21/2020; “Exclu­sive: Inside the Military’s Top Secret Plans If the Coro­n­avirus Crip­ples Gov­ern­ment” by William M. Arkin; Newsweek; 3/18/2020; “Exclu­sive: U.S. Mil­i­tary Acti­vates Its Nev­er-Before-Used Fed­er­al Response to Com­bat Coro­n­avirus Out­break” by William M. Arkin; Newsweek; 2/27/2020.; “For Auto­crats and Oth­ers, Coro­n­avirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Pow­er” by Selam Gebrikadan; The New York Times; 3/30/2020.; “Media Dis­sent Fades as Modi Tight­ens Grip” by Vin­du Goel and Jef­frey Gettleman;The New York Times; 4/3/2020.; “Coro­n­avirus Sur­veil­lance Is Enter­ing Dystopi­an Ter­ri­to­ry” by Eric Lutz; Van­i­ty Fair; 4/9/2020.

3.–FTR #1127 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 3: The Eugenic Virus: The dis­pro­por­tion­ate dam­age being inflict­ed by the pan­dem­ic on minorities–African-Americans and Lati­nos in par­tic­u­lar, has received con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion. Eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged to a con­sid­er­able extent and sub­ject to the phys­i­o­log­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal and behav­ioral lia­bil­i­ties stem­ming from that state of affairs, they are more vul­ner­a­ble to the rav­ages of the virus. In addi­tion, “social-dis­tanc­ing” is a lux­u­ry that many poor peo­ple can not afford. Anoth­er major con­sid­er­a­tion con­cerns the rationing of health care. Peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties are afraid they will be shunt­ed “to the back of the line” when it comes time for them to receive prop­er treat­ment. The elder­ly are falling ill and dying all over the world. (“Peo­ple with Dis­abil­i­ties Are Afraid They Will Be Dis­crim­i­nat­ed Against Because of Coro­n­avirus” by Rick Jer­vais; USA Today; 3/26/2020.; “Who Should Be Saved First? Experts Offer Med­ical Guid­ance” by Austin Frakt; The New York Times; 3/24/2020.; “Ear­ly Data Shows African Amer­i­cans Con­tract­ing and Dying of Coro­n­avirus at an Alarm­ing Rate” by Aki­lah John­son and Talia Buford; ProP­ub­li­ca; 4/3/2020.; “Social Dis­tanc­ing Is A Priv­i­lege” by Charles Blow; The New York Times; 4/5/2020. ; “Scape­goat­ing New York Means Ignor­ing Its Des­per­ate Need” by Kim Phillips-Fein; The New York Times; 4/5/2020.

4.–FTR #1128 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 4: The Wealth-Con­cen­trat­ing Virus: In FTR #‘s 1111 and 1112, among oth­er pro­grams, we spoke of the net­work­ing and invest­ing of Steve Ban­non, J. Kyle Bass and Tom­my Hicks, Jr. Bass, you will recall, is asym­met­ri­cal­ly invest­ed with regard to the economies in Hong Kong and Chi­na. He has cer­tain­ly made mon­ey, as have many oth­ers. With the Fed­er­al Reserve esti­mat­ing unem­ploy­ment at rates that may reach 32% and econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man opin­ing that this down­turn will be three to five times as bad as the 2008 finan­cial col­lapse, those who do have mon­ey will be able to buy up assets at pen­nies on the dol­lar. An arti­cle in The Guardian dis­cuss­es hedge fund returns of as much as 4,000+ per­cent for some firms. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of “insid­er knowl­edge” of the com­ing pan­dem­ic sug­gests itself. It should be not­ed that J. Kyle Bass made his for­tune bet­ting against the sub­prime hous­ing mar­ket. In this pro­gram, we will dis­cuss his role in help­ing to bring down Bear Stearns in the 2008 col­lapse. A for­mer employ­ee of that ill-fat­ed com­pa­ny, Bass leaked dam­ag­ing infor­ma­tion about Bear Stearns to a Wall Street Jour­nal reporter, there­by pre­cip­i­tat­ing the col­lapse of the firm. (“Coro­n­avirus job loss­es could total 47 mil­lion, unem­ploy­ment rate may hit 32%, Fed esti­mates” by Jeff Cox; CNBC; 03/30/2020; “Hedge funds ‘rak­ing in bil­lions’ dur­ing coro­n­avirus cri­sis” by Rupert Neate Wealth and Jasper Jol­ly; The Guardian; 04/09/2020.; “WSJ: ‘Twas Kyle Bass that Killed Bear Stearns” by Thorn­ton McEnery; Dealbreaker.com; 3/29/2016 [Updat­ed on 1/14/2019.]; “Nas­sim Taleb-Advised Uni­ver­sa Tail Fund Returned 3,600% in March” by Erik Schatzk­er; Bloomberg; 04/08/2020; “How A Goat Farmer Built A Dooms­day Machine That Just Booked A 4,144% Return” by Antoine Gara; Forbes; 04/13/2020.

5.–FTR #1129 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 5: Walkin’ The Coro­n­avirus: In the Nazi tract Ser­pen­t’s Walk–which we have dis­cussed for decades–the SS go under­ground (which they did), buy into the opin­ion-form­ing media (which they did) and, infil­trate the mil­i­tary (which they have done), and, after a ter­ror­ist attack by genet­i­cal­ly-engi­neered virus­es dec­i­mates large parts of the Unit­ed States, mar­tial law is declared and the Nazis take over. From Ser­pen­t’s Walk: “. . . . ‘Yes. Well. ‘Pacov’ stands for ‘Pan­dem­ic Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Virus,’ one of the ugli­er results of mil­i­tary exper­i­men­ta­tion with recom­bi­nant DNA. Do you know what that is?’. . . . ‘Very well, let me tell you in layman’s terms.’ Mul­der extend­ed a hand to shush Wrench, who had start­ed to speak. ‘Pacov con­sists of two sep­a­rate re-work­ings of two DNA chains of exist­ing virus­es. It’s a pig­gy-back weapon, a two-stage oper­a­tion. You send in the first stage. The vec­tors . . . agents of trans­mis­sion . . . for Pacov‑1 are exten­sive. It trav­els through the air, the water, or direct­ly from per­son-to-per­son and is high­ly con­ta­gious. It spreads for hun­dreds of miles, if con­di­tions are opti­mal.  Pacov‑1 pro­duces only a mild, flu-like infec­tion that dis­ap­pears with­in a day or two. Pub­lic health author­i­ties would over­look it, nev­er con­sid­er it a seri­ous epi­dem­ic, and even if they did they’d have to look care­ful­ly to iso­late it. Once a vic­tim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov‑1 becomes dor­mant and almost unde­tectable. A month or two lat­er, you send in the sec­ond stage: Pacov‑2 is also a virus, just as con­ta­gious as the first, and just as harm­less by itself. It reacts with Pacov‑1 to pro­duce a pow­er­ful coag­u­lant. . . . you die with­in three min­utes. No warn­ing, no vac­cine, no cure. Those not exposed to both stages remain unharmed. . . . Pacov‑2 goes inert, like Pacov‑1 with­in a week or two. Then you get your victim’s coun­try, all his prop­er­ty, in undam­aged con­di­tion. . . . and a lot of corpses to bury.’ . . . .”

6.–FTR #1130: Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 6: Context–the Chi­na-Killing Virus: Ana­lyzes the Covid-19 out­break in the con­text of the anti-Chi­na, full-court press, high­light­ed in, among oth­er, pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1089 through 1095, 1103, 1104, 1105. (“Unleash the Pri­va­teers” by Colonel Mark Can­cion (USMC—Retired) and Bran­don Schwartz; U.S. Naval Insti­tute Mag­a­zine; April 2020 [Vol. 146/2/1,406; “Inside the World Uyghur Con­gress: The US-backed right-wing regime change net­work seek­ing the ‘fall of Chi­na’” by Ajit Singh; The Gray Zone; 03/05/2020; “Coro­n­avirus Alarm Blends Yel­low Per­il and Red Scare” by Joshua Cho; Fair­ness and Accu­ra­cy in Report­ing; 3/6/2020.)

7.–FTR #1131 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse, Part 7: Pinch­back­’s Per­spec­tive: ” . . . .Barag­o­na was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . . Gar­ri­son also obtained a tran­script of a let­ter writ­ten by Fer­rie to Barag­o­na. Next to Barag­o­na’s name, Gar­ri­son wrote: ‘Note Barag­o­na is impor­tant.’ The let­ter had been sent to Gar­ri­son by Glenn Pinch­back, and a car­bon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a con­gress­man from Geor­gia. (Pinch­back worked in the Oper­a­tions Com­mand at Fort Sill, where he inter­cept­ed mail.) In the let­ter, Fer­rie shared his dream of the re-uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­many and liv­ing in a world where all the cur­ren­cy was in Deutschmarks. Pinch­back­’s sum­ma­tion of the let­ter described a ‘Neo-Nazi plot to enslave Amer­i­ca in the name of anti-Com­mu­nism,’ and ‘a neo-Nazi plot gar­gan­tu­an in scope.’ The Fer­rie let­ter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinch­back also report­ed­ly obtained a let­ter from David Fer­rie to Barag­o­na con­fess­ing his role in the assas­si­na­tion of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill sol­dier. . . .”

8.–FTR #1132 Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now, Part 8: The Nazi Virus: This pro­gram will syn­the­size the var­i­ous aspects of the “Bio-Psy-Op Apoc­a­lypse Now” series, demon­strat­ing how the var­i­ous con­cep­tu­al com­po­nents set forth here­in con­sti­tute a Nazi “Full-Spec­trum Dom­i­nance.”

FTR #1094 The Destabilization of China, Part 5: Pan-Turkism, Islamism and The Earth Island Boogie

This pro­gram con­tin­ues with exam­i­na­tion of cen­trifu­gal polit­i­cal and geo-polit­i­cal forces at work in the appar­ent­ly ongo­ing desta­bi­liza­tion of Chi­na.

This is a com­plex top­ic, involv­ing sub­jects dealt with at great length in past pro­grams over the years. We rec­om­mend using the search func­tion on this web­site (using quo­ta­tion marks) to gain a deep­er under­stand­ing of what Mr. Emory calls “The Earth Island Boo­gie.”

By the same token, under­stand­ing that con­cept involves obtain­ing a grasp of Pan-Turk­ism and some of its man­i­fes­ta­tions in the Uighur milieu inside Chi­na.

This descrip­tion has links to key pro­grams that will flesh out the lis­ten­ers’ under­stand­ing.

We begin an analy­sis of the use of the Turko­phone, Mus­lim Uighurs as a desta­bi­liz­ing ele­ment in Chi­na’s min­er­al and petro­le­um-rich Xin­jiang semi­au­tonomous region.

Linked to Al-Qae­da, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and con­tribut­ing to the jihadist milieu in Syr­ia, the Uighurs also fig­ure into the Pan-Turk­ist milieu cov­ered in, among oth­er pro­grams: AFA #14, as well as FTR #‘s 720, 723, 819, 857, 862, 863, 878, 879, 884, 885, 886, 911.

Note that the geo­graph­i­cal focal point of the Uighur separatist/jihadist activ­i­ty not only encom­pass­es min­er­al and resource-rich Xin­jiang province, but lies in the area Chi­na has des­ig­nat­ed as an impor­tant area for their “Belt and Road Ini­tia­tive.” That ini­tia­tive is a pro­gram designed to build rail con­nec­tions across what is known as “The Earth Island,” a project which appears to entail deep alarm on the part of inter­ests in the West.

” . . . . The Uighur sep­a­ratist spec­trum is over­lapped by the Uighur jiha­di milieu, who link the issue of Xin­jiang’s seces­sion from Chi­na to that of form­ing a Salafist theoc­ra­cy. Uighur jihadis have long since expand­ed their radius of actions beyond Chi­na’s bor­ders. This first drew pub­lic atten­tion, when it was report­ed that, in ‘the war on ter­ror,’ which began in 2002, the Unit­ed States had been hold­ing more than 20 Uighurs in their tor­ture cham­bers at Guan­taná­mo. The last of the pris­on­ers were released only in late 2013. Uighur jihadis have long since expand­ed beyond their Afghanistan engage­ment to oth­er regions of the world. . . . Uighur jihadis’ activ­i­ties have also been reg­is­tered in oth­er South­east Asian coun­tries, such as Malaysia and Indone­sia — from where quite a few con­tin­ue on to Turkey, to sup­port the IS or al Qae­da. Last year, Chi­na had esti­mat­ed that up to 300 Uighurs are fight­ing in the ranks of IS, while Syr­i­an gov­ern­ment offi­cials set the fig­ures at up to 5,000 Uighurs who are oper­at­ing in var­i­ous jiha­di mili­tias in Syr­ia. Regard­less of the accu­ra­cy of these esti­mates, experts are cer­tain that a large con­tin­gent of Uighur mili­tias are fight­ing with­in the ranks of IS and al Qae­da. An analy­sis pub­lished by the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter for Counter-Ter­ror­ism in The Hague warns that the Uighur jiha­di threat is large­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed in the West.[9] . . . . For Chi­na, this ter­ror­ism is that much more seri­ous, because Xin­jiang is a strate­gi­cal­ly impor­tant region. That autonomous region com­pris­es cen­tral sec­tors of the ‘New Silk Road’ (‘Belt and Road Ini­tia­tive,’ BRI) project, cur­rent­ly Bei­jing’s most impor­tant for­eign pol­i­cy mega-project. Unrest in Xin­jiang threat­ens not only the Peo­ple’s Repub­lic of Chi­na’s domes­tic tran­quil­i­ty, but also its rise in world pol­i­cy. This unrest is being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fanned from abroad. Turkey, under Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has assumed a promi­nent role. While still may­or of Istan­bul and long before becom­ing Turkey’s pres­i­dent, Erdoğan had declared that ‘East Turkestan is not only the home­land of the Tur­kic peo­ples, but also the cra­dle of Tur­kic his­to­ry, civ­i­liza­tion, and cul­ture. The mar­tyrs of East Turkestan are our martyrs.’[10] Uighur jihadis have reg­u­lar­ly used Turkey as a safe haven. In his talk with german-foreign-policy.com, the Ger­man expert on intel­li­gence ser­vices, Erich Schmidt-Een­boom con­firmed that Ankara’s intel­li­gence ser­vice has repeat­ed­ly ‘sought to sup­port seces­sion­ist attempts’ in Xinjiang.[11] . . . .”

The Uighur/Al Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood/jihadist milieu is also dis­cussed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 348, 549, 550, 615.

Next, we detail the long his­to­ry of NATO and relat­ed ele­ments using the Uighurs to desta­bi­lize Chi­na, with Ger­many as an epi­cen­ter of Uighur activ­i­ty.

We review the ter­ror­ism against mem­bers of the Han Chi­nese major­i­ty in Xin­jiang by Uighurs.

” . . . . Already since the 1990s, Xin­jiang has been faced with ter­ror­ist attacks by mem­bers of the Tur­kic-speak­ing Uighur minor­i­ty, fight­ing to secede this autonomous region from Chi­na, to found “East Turkestan.” Some seek an even­tu­al fusion with the Tur­kic-speak­ing coun­tries of Cen­tral Asia. The attacks that became known in the West includ­ed a Uighur ter­ror­ist attack at a coal mine in Xin­jiang in Sep­tem­ber 2015. The assailants delib­er­ate­ly tar­get­ed non-Tur­kic-speak­ing work­ers — espe­cial­ly those of Chi­na’s major­i­ty Han pop­u­la­tion — slaugh­ter­ing them with long knives. Accord­ing to west­ern media reports, at least 50 peo­ple died in the attack.[7] March 1, 2014 eight Uighur ter­ror­ists armed also with knives attacked civil­ian trav­el­ers in a train sta­tion of Kun­ming, the cap­i­tal of Yun­nan Province, killing 31 and wound­ing around 150, some seri­ous­ly. There have also been recur­ring pogroms tar­get­ing Han Chi­nese. For exam­ple, in July 2009, sev­er­al thou­sand Uighur in Xin­jiang’s cap­i­tal, Urumqi, attacked Han Chi­nese. Accord­ing to offi­cial fig­ures, 197 peo­ple were killed; how­ev­er, observers cal­cu­late the actu­al body count to be much high­er. . . . ”

As high­light­ed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 547, 548, 549, 550, the Uighurs are part of a cen­tripetal desta­bi­liza­tion effort against Chi­na, uti­liz­ing the Dalai Lama’s SS-linked milieu, ele­ments of CIA, and the Haps­burg-con­trolled UNPO to effect the par­tial dis­mem­ber­ment of that coun­try.

We con­clude with dis­cus­sion about the Hong Kong Shang­hai Bank­ing Cor­po­ra­tion. A major British bank, the growth of its largesse was inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the opi­um trade Britain forced on Chi­na through the Opi­um Wars.

The bank per­pet­u­at­ed it’s involve­ment with major nar­cotics traf­fick­ing, laun­der­ing funds for con­tem­po­rary drug car­tels.

Ulti­mate­ly, the bank became a vehi­cle for the financ­ing of ele­ments of Al-Qae­da and jihadism. We won­der if per­haps jihadist ele­ments of the Uighurs may be receiv­ing fund­ing through the insti­tu­tion?

FTR #1093 The Destabilization of China, Part 4

We begin with an excerpt of a New York Times arti­cle what epit­o­mizes the pro­pa­gan­dized and unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic tone of our media with regard to Chi­na.

The arti­cle mocks the Chi­nese asser­tion that the U.S. is involved with unrest with Hong Kong, remark­ing that Chi­na ” . . . . has a long his­to­ry of blam­ing ‘for­eign forces’ for chal­lenges it has faced inter­nal­ly. . . .” This comes from the pub­li­ca­tion that has unwa­ver­ing­ly flogged the “Rus­sia-Gate” non­sense.

The arti­cle also pooh-poohs Chi­nese asser­tion that the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy was work­ing with the CIA to spon­sor unrest in Hong Kong.

In FTR #s 1091 and 1092, we not­ed the involve­ment of the Nation­al Endow­ment for Democ­ra­cy with key play­ers in the Hong Kong dra­ma, as well as their net­work­ing with major U.S. politi­cians, includ­ing Mike Pence and Mike Pom­peo.

In past pro­grams, we have dis­cussed the Nation­al Endow­ment For Democ­ra­cy, a “kinder, gen­tler” U.S. intel­li­gence man­i­fes­ta­tion.

NED has sup­ple­ment­ed the decades-old tra­di­tion of CIA desta­bi­liza­tion and over­throw of gov­ern­ments that the U.S. views with a jaun­diced eye.

The Chi­nese analy­sis of the role of the NED is accu­rate. “. . . . One of the NED co-founders, Allen Wein­stein, explained its pur­pose to the Wash­ing­ton Post: ‘A lot of what we do today was done covert­ly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ . . . . ”

Next, we exam­ine an infor­ma­tive post from Ger­man For­eign Pol­i­cy, which notes that pend­ing leg­is­la­tion in the U.S. Con­gress would eco­nom­i­cal­ly dam­age U.S. and Ger­man com­mer­cial inter­ests, as well as hurt­ing Hong Kong’s econ­o­my.

We con­clude with a top­ic we have cov­ered before and will explore at greater length in our next broad­cast. We begin an analy­sis of the use of the Turko­phone, Mus­lim Uighurs as a desta­bi­liz­ing ele­ment in Chi­na’s min­er­al and petro­le­um-rich Xin­jiang semi­au­tonomous region.

Linked to Al-Qae­da, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and con­tribut­ing to the jihadist milieu in Syr­ia, the Uighurs also fig­ure into the Pan-Turk­ist milieu cov­ered in, among oth­er pro­grams: AFA #14, as well as FTR #‘s 720, 723, 819, 857, 862, 863, 878, 879, 884, 885, 886, 911.

The Uighur/Al Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood/jihadist milieu is dis­cussed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 348, 549, 550, 615.

FTR #1089 Fascism: 2019 World Tour, Part 4 (Goose Hopping in Hong Kong with Pepe the Frog)

Con­tin­u­ing our look at glob­al fas­cism, we vis­it Hong Kong and (by exten­sion) Chi­na, where an intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty desta­bi­liza­tion effort is under­way. That effort is uti­liz­ing Islam­ic fas­cists in the Uighur com­mu­ni­ty in Xin­jiang Province and the Falun Gong, a fas­cist mind con­trol cult that has devel­oped close oper­a­tional links with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Steve Ban­non and the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors (a CIA “deriv­a­tive.”)

Begin­ning our sojourn in Hong Kong, we review the preva­lence of the Pepe the Frog icon in the Hong Kong protests. “The New York Times’ ” dis­claimer that the pro­test­ers are not “alt-right” should be seen in per­spec­tive.

With Steve Ban­non at the epi­cen­ter of the anti-Chi­na move­ment, Pepe’s pres­ence in Hong Kong is not sur­pris­ing.

Note Ban­non and com­pa­ny’s net­work­ing with the Falun Gong cult.

In our long series pred­i­cat­ed on Yasha Levine’s “Sur­veil­lance Val­ley,” we not­ed the Inter­net Free­dom move­ment and its fun­da­men­tal posi­tion as part of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s “soft pow­er” pro­pa­gan­da and regime change arse­nal.

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? . . . .”

In Chi­na, Falun Gong is among the recip­i­ents of Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors mon­ey. Recall that the BBG is a CIA “deriv­a­tive.”: ” . . . .It also fund­ed sev­er­al small out­fits run by prac­ti­tion­ers of Falun gong, a con­tro­ver­sial Chi­nese anti­com­mu­nist cult banned in Chi­na whose leader believes that humans are being cor­rupt­ed by aliens from oth­er dimen­sions and that peo­ple of mixed blood are sub­hu­mans and unfit for sal­va­tion. . . . ”

After excerpt­ing a puff piece that lion­izes Falun Gong in their strug­gles with the Chi­nese, we high­light the beliefs of the orga­ni­za­tion.

The Falun Gong teach­es that: post menopausal women can regain men­stru­a­tion, con­sid­ered manda­to­ry for spir­i­tu­al evo­lu­tion; gays are demo­nized; mixed race peo­ple are demo­nized; cult mem­bers are dis­cour­aged from seek­ing mod­ern med­ical treat­ment; space aliens are inhab­it­ing human bod­ies and are respon­si­ble for mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy such as air­planes and com­put­ers; tiny beings are said to be invad­ing human bod­ies and caus­ing “bad kar­ma;” mas­ter Li Hongzhi knows the secrets of the uni­verse; mas­ter Li Hongzhi can lev­i­tate and walk through walls; mas­ter Li Hongzhi can install a phys­i­cal “Falun”–swastika–in the abdomen of fol­low­ers which revolves in var­i­ous direc­tions; Falun Gong teach­ing demo­nizes fem­i­nists and pop­u­lar music; there will be a “Judge­ment Day” on which com­mu­nists and oth­ers deemed unwor­thy by mas­ter Li Hongzhi will be neu­tral­ized.

We con­clude with part of an arti­cle which will be pre­sent­ed and ana­lyzed at greater length in our next pro­gram.

Falun Gong–largely through its Epoch Times newspaper–has estab­lished a major social media pres­ence and is a key ally of Pres­i­dent Trump’s re-elec­tion effort: “. . . . In April, at the height of its ad spend­ing, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and dig­i­tal video out­let New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, com­bined for around 3 bil­lion views on Face­book, YouTube and Twit­ter, rank­ing 11th among all video cre­ators across plat­forms and out­rank­ing every oth­er tra­di­tion­al news pub­lish­er, accord­ing to data from the social media ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny Tubu­lar. That engage­ment has made The Epoch Times a favorite of the Trump fam­i­ly and a key com­po­nent of the president’s re-elec­tion cam­paign

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 #1079 Surveillance Valley, Part 5: Double Agents (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 2)

Con­tin­u­ing with our exam­i­na­tion of Yasha Levine’s sem­i­nal vol­ume Sur­veil­lance Val­ley, we con­tin­ue our analy­sis of the indi­vid­u­als, insti­tu­tions and tech­nolo­gies cen­tral to the so-called “online pri­va­cy” effort. The Tor Project, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund and Jacob Appel­baum are all the oppo­site of what they have been rep­re­sent­ed as being.

We begin with infor­ma­tion over­lapped from our last pro­gram, high­light­ing how Jacob Appel­baum and the Tor net­work hooked up with Wik­iLeaks.

Tor, Appel­baum, Assange and Wik­iLeaks:

1.–Became increas­ing­ly inter­twined, enjoy­ing acco­lades from many, appar­ent­ly unsus­pect­ing, groups: ” . . . .  His [Appel­baum’s] asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks and Assange boost­ed the Tor Pro­jec­t’s pub­lic pro­file and rad­i­cal cre­den­tials. Sup­port and acco­lades poured in from jour­nal­ists, pri­va­cy orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ment watch­dogs. The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union part­nered with Appel­baum on an Inter­net pri­va­cy project, and New York’s Whit­ney Museum—one of the lead­ing mod­ern art muse­ums in the world—invited him for a ‘Sur­veil­lance Teach-In.’ The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion gave Tor its Pio­neer Award, and Roger Din­gle­dine made in on For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine’s Top 100 Glob­al Thinkers for pro­tect­ing ‘any­one and every­one from the dan­gers of Big Broth­er.’ . . . .”
2.– Dif­fered fun­da­men­tal­ly from the accept­ed text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endors­ing Tor, reporters assumed that the US gov­ern­ment saw the anonymi­ty non­prof­it as a threat. But inter­nal doc­u­ments obtained through FOIA from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, as well as analy­sis of Tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts paint a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. They reveal that Appel­baum and Din­gle­dine worked with Assange on secur­ing Wik­iLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their han­dlers at the BBG informed about their rela­tion­ship and even pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Wik­iLeak­s’s secure sub­mis­sion sys­tem. . . .”
3.–Did not adverse­ly affect the gov­ern­ment fund­ing of Tor at all, as might be expect­ed by the super­fi­cial appar­ent real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion: ” . . . . Per­haps most telling was that sup­port from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] con­tin­ued even after Wik­iLeaks began pub­lish­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and Appel­baum became the tar­get of a larg­er Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion into Wik­iLeaks. For exam­ple, on July 31, 2010, CNET report­ed that Appel­baum had been detained at the Las Vegas air­port and ques­tioned about his rela­tion­ship with Wik­iLeaks. News of the deten­tion made head­lines around the world, once again high­light­ing Appel­baum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week lat­er, Tor’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Andrew Lew­man, clear­ly wor­ried that this might affect Tor’s fund­ing, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smooth­ing things over and answer­ing ‘any ques­tions you may have about the recent press regard­ing Jake and Wik­iLeaks.’ But Lew­man was in for a pleas­ant sur­prise: Roger Din­gle­dine had been keep­ing folks at the BBG in the loop, and every­thing seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a num­ber of ques­tions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
4.–” . . . . In 2011 con­tracts came in with­out a hitch–$150,000 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and $227,118 from the State Depart­ment. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of mon­ey from the Pen­ta­gon: a new $503,706 annu­al con­tract from the Space and Naval War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, an elite infor­ma­tion and intel­li­gence unit that hous­es a top-secret cyber-war­fare division.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stan­ford mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that had done coun­terin­sur­gency, net­work­ing, and chem­i­cal weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larg­er Navy ‘Com­mand, Con­trol, Com­munca­tions, Com­put­ers, Intel­li­gence, Sur­veil­lance, and Recon­nais­sance’ pro­gram to improve mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. A year lat­er, Tor would see its gov­ern­ment con­tracts more than dou­ble to $2.2 mil­lion: $353,000 from the State Depart­ment, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. . . .”

In this con­text, we recall some ear­li­er obser­va­tions about Wik­iLeaks. John Young, one of Wik­iLeaks’ founders turned crit­ic of the orga­ni­za­tion har­bors deep sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the group. ” . . . they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment. They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­ti­ty. They don’t account for the mon­ey. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re real­ly up to. . .There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­al­ly don’t know. But it’s cer­tain­ly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­al­ly pret­ty elab­o­rate and pret­ty care­ful­ly run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cov­er sto­ry. That actu­al­ly was talked about at (Sunday’s) pan­el. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. . . .” The Tor/Appelbaum/BBG (read “CIA”)/WikiLeaks nexus may very well be proof of Young’s sus­pi­cions.

Appel­baum, Wik­iLeaks and Tor became fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tions of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den. In past dis­cus­sion, we have not­ed that in the sum­mer of 2009, when Snow­den made his deci­sion to dis­close the NSA doc­u­ments, he was work­ing for the very same CIA from which the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund were derived. Jacob Appel­baum was fund­ed by BBG, as was Tor. ” . . . . From the start, the Tor Project stood at the cen­ter of Snow­den’s sto­ry. The leak­er’s endorse­ment and pro­mo­tion intro­duced the project to a glob­al audi­ence, boost­ing Tor’s world­wide user base from one mil­lion to six mil­lion almost overnight and inject­ing it into the heart of a bur­geon­ing pri­va­cy move­ment. In Rus­sia, where the BBG and Din­gle­dine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deploy­ment plan, use of the soft­ware increased from twen­ty thou­sand dai­ly con­nec­tions to some­where around two hun­dred thou­sand.

“Dur­ing a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Tor Project, Snow­den said: ‘With­out Tor, the streets of the Inter­net become like the streets of a very heav­i­ly sur­veilled city. There are sur­veil­lance cam­eras every­where, and if the adver­sary sim­ply takes enough time, they can fol­low the tapes back and see every­thing you’ve done. With Tor, we have pri­vate spaces and pri­vate lives, where we can choose who we want to asso­ciate with and how, with­out the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. The design of the Tor sys­tem is struc­tured in such a way that even if the US Gov­ern­ment want­ed to sub­vert it, it could­n’t.’ Snow­den did­n’t talk about Tor’s con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment fund­ing, nor did he address an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion: why the US gov­ern­ment would fund a pro­gram that sup­pos­ed­ly lim­it­ed its own pow­er. What­ev­er Snow­den’s pri­vate thought on the mat­ter, his endorse­ment gave Tor the high­est pos­si­ble seal of approval. It was like a Hack­er’s Medal of Val­or. With Snow­den’s back­ing, no one even thought to ques­tion Tor’s rad­i­cal antigov­ern­ment bona fides. . . .”

Next, we review infor­ma­tion about the so-called “Arab Spring.” In FTR #‘s 733 through 739, we pre­sent­ed our view that the so-called Arab Spring was a U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, aimed at plac­ing the Broth­er­hood in pow­er in Mus­lim coun­tries dom­i­nat­ed either by a sec­u­lar dic­ta­tor or absolute monar­chy.

Yasha Levine has high­light­ed the role of U.S. tech per­son­nel in train­ing and prep­ping the Arab Spring online activists. As we have not­ed in the past, the so-called Arab Spring might have been bet­ter thought of as “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” as the neo-lib­er­al, pri­va­ti­za­tion ide­ol­o­gy of Broth­er­hood eco­nom­ic icon Ibn Khal­dun was fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tion.

The eco­nom­ic goals of the Arab Spring “op” were reviewed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1025 and 1026.

Recall while read­ing the fol­low­ing excerpts of this remark­able and impor­tant book, that:

1.–The Tor net­work was devel­oped by, and used and com­pro­mised by, ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.
2.–One of the pri­ma­ry advo­cates and spon­sors of the Tor net­work is the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. As we saw in FTR #‘s 891, 895, is an exten­sion of the CIA.
3.–Jacob Appel­baum has been financed by the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, advo­cates use of the Tor net­work, has helped Wik­iLeaks with its exten­sive use of the Tor net­work, and is an ide­o­log­i­cal acolyte of Ayn Rand.

The Arab Spring pro­vid­ed moti­va­tion for enhanced U.S. fund­ing for Inter­net Free­dom. The Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, like the BBG a CIA “deriv­a­tive,” was at the cen­ter of this: ” . . . . The moti­va­tion for this expan­sion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US gov­ern­ment would main­tain its tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the cen­sor­ship arms race that began in the ear­ly 2000s, but the funds were also going into devel­op­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of tools aimed at lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the Inter­net to help for­eign oppo­si­tion activists orga­nize into cohe­sive polit­i­cal move­ments. The BBG’s $25.5 mil­lion cut of the cash more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s anti­cen­sor­ship tech­nol­o­gy bud­get from the pre­vi­ous year, and the BBG fun­neled the mon­ey into the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, a new orga­ni­za­tion it had cre­at­ed with­in Radio Free Asia to fund Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies in the wake of the Arab Spring. . . .”

The fun­da­men­tal posi­tion of BBG and OTF (read “CIA”) to the so-called online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty was con­cise­ly expressed by Yasha Levine: ” . . . . From behind this hip and con­nect­ed exte­ri­or, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed incu­ba­tor for Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies, pour­ing mil­lions into projects big and small, includ­ing every­thing from evad­ing cen­sor­ship to help­ing polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, protests, and move­ment build­ing. With its deep pock­ets and its recruit­ment of big-name pri­va­cy activists, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund did­n’t just thrust itself into the pri­va­cy move­ment. In many ways, it WAS the pri­va­cy move­ment. . . .”

FTR #1078 Surveillance Valley, Part 4: Tor Up (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 1.)

Yasha Levine’s sum­ma­tion of the inex­tri­ca­ble nature and sym­bio­sis between the Inter­net, the tech firms and the so-called “pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty” 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.

After detail­ing the his­to­ry of the devel­op­ment of the Inter­net by the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, Levine presents the sto­ry of the devel­op­ment of the Tor net­work.

Key points of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion:

1.–Tor’s Sil­i­con Val­ley back­ing: ” . . . . Pri­va­cy groups fund­ed by com­pa­nies like Google and Face­book, includ­ing the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and Fight for the Future, were some of Tor’s biggest and most ded­i­cat­ed back­ers. Google had direct­ly bankrolled its devel­op­ment, pay­ing out gen­er­ous grants to col­lege stu­dents who worked at Tor dur­ing their sum­mer vaca­tions. Why would an Inter­net com­pa­ny whose entire busi­ness rest­ed on track­ing peo­ple online pro­mote and help devel­op a pow­er­ful pri­va­cy tool? Some­thing did­n’t add up. . . .”
2.–Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Tor does not shield users from orgias­tic data min­ing by Sil­i­con Val­ley tech giants: ” . . . . Tor works only if peo­ple are ded­i­cat­ed to main­tain­ing a strict anony­mous Inter­net rou­tine: using only dum­my email address­es and bogus accounts, car­ry­ing out all finan­cial trans­ac­tions in Bit­coin and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies, and nev­er men­tion­ing their real name in emails or mes­sages. For the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple on the Internet—those who use Gmail, inter­act with Face­book friends, and shop on Amazon—you reveal your iden­ti­ty. These com­pa­nies know who you are. They know your name, your ship­ping address, your cred­it card infor­ma­tion. They con­tin­ue to scan your emails, map your social net­works, and com­pile dossiers. Tor or not, once you enter your account name and pass­word, Tor’s anonymi­ty tech­nol­o­gy becomes use­less. . . .”
3.–Silicon Val­ley’s sup­port for Tor is some­thing of a “false bro­mide”: ” . . . . After all, Snow­den’s leaked doc­u­ments revealed that any­thing Inter­net com­pa­nies had, the NSA had as well. I was puz­zled, but at least I under­stood why Tor had back­ing from Sil­i­con Val­ley: it offered a false sense of pri­va­cy, while not pos­ing a threat to the indus­try’s under­ly­ing sur­veil­lance mod­el. . . .”
4.–Tor is, in fact, financed by ele­ments of the very same intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment that sup­pos­ed­ly frustrated/“locked out” by Tor! ” . . . . But as I ana­lyzed the orga­ni­za­tion’s finan­cial doc­u­ments, I found that the oppo­site was true. Tor had come out of a joint US Navy—DARPA mil­i­tary project in the ear­ly 2000s and con­tin­ued to rely on a series of fed­er­al con­tracts after it was spun off into a pri­vate non­prof­it. This fund­ing came from the Pen­ta­gon, the State Depart­ment, and at least one orga­ni­za­tion that derived from the CIA. These con­tracts added up to sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars a year and, most years,  account­ed for more than 90 per­cent of Tor’s oper­at­ing bud­get. Tor was a fed­er­al mil­i­tary con­trac­tor. It even had its own fed­er­al con­tract­ing num­ber. . . This includ­ed Tor’s founder, Roger Din­gle­dine, who spent a sum­mer work­ing at the NSA and who had brought Tor to life under a series of DARPA and Navy con­tracts. . . .”

Wide­ly regard­ed as a cham­pi­on of Inter­net free­dom and pri­va­cy, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion helped finance Tor and cham­pi­oned its use.

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of the EFF/Tor alliance include:

1.–EFF’s ear­ly financ­ing of Tor: ” . . . . . . . . In 2004, [Roger] Din­gle­dine struck out on his own, spin­ning the mil­i­tary onion rout­ing project into a non-prof­it cor­po­ra­tion called the Tor Project and, while still fund­ed by DARPA and the Navy, began scratch­ing around for pri­vate fund­ing. He got help from an unex­pect­ed ally: the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quar­ter mil­lion dol­lars to keep it going while Din­gle­dine looked for oth­er pri­vate spon­sors. The EFF even host­ed Tor’s web­site. . . .”
2.–The EFF’s effu­sive praise for the fun­da­men­tal­ly com­pro­mised Tor Project: ” . . . . ‘The Tor Project is a per­fect fit for EFF, because one of our pri­ma­ry goals is to pro­tect the pri­va­cy and anonymi­ty of Inter­net users. Tor can help peo­ple exer­cise their First Amend­ment right to free, anony­mous speech online.’ EFF’s tech­nol­o­gy man­ag­er Chris Palmer explained in a 2004 press release, which curi­ous­ly failed to men­tion that Tor was devel­oped pri­mar­i­ly for mil­i­tary intel­li­gence use and was still active­ly fund­ed by the Pen­ta­gon. . . .”
3.–The EFF’s his­to­ry of work­ing with ele­ments of the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment: ” . . . . In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Assis­tance for Law Enforce­ment Act, which required all telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies to build their equip­ment so that it could be wire­tapped by the FBI. In 1999, EFF worked to sup­port NATO’s bomb­ing cam­paign in Koso­vo with some­thing called the ‘Koso­vo Pri­va­cy Sup­port,’ which aimed to keep the region’s Inter­net access open dur­ing mil­i­tary action. Sell­ing a Pen­ta­gon intel­li­gence project as a grass­roots pri­va­cy tool—it did­n’t seem all that wild. . . .”
4.–In FTR #854, we not­ed that EFF co-founder John Per­ry Bar­low was far more than a Grate­ful Dead lyricist/hippie icon: ” . . . . Indeed, in 2002, a few years before it fund­ed Tor, EFF cofounder [John] Per­ry Bar­low casu­al­ly admit­ted that he had been con­sult­ing for intel­li­gence agen­cies for a decade. It seemed that the worlds of sol­diers, spies, and pri­va­cy weren’t as far apart as they appeared. . . .”
5.–EFF’s grav­i­tas in the online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty lent Tor great cred­i­bil­i­ty: ” . . . . EFF’s sup­port for Tor was a big deal. The orga­ni­za­tion com­mand­ed respect in Sil­i­con Val­ley and was wide­ly seen as the ACLU of the Inter­net Age. The fact that it backed Tor meant that no hard ques­tions would be asked about the anonymi­ty tool’s mil­i­tary ori­gins as it tran­si­tioned to the civil­ian world. And that’s exact­ly what hap­pened. . . .”

In FTR #‘s 891 and 895, we not­ed the pri­ma­ry posi­tion of the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors in the devel­op­ment of the so-called “pri­va­cy” net­works. The BBG is a CIA off­shoot: “. . . .  The BBG might have had a bland sound­ing name and pro­fessed a noble mis­sion to inform the world and spread democ­ra­cy. In truth, the orga­ni­za­tion was an out­growth of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. . . . The bulk of the BBG is no longer fund­ed from the CIA’s black bud­get, but the agen­cy’s orig­i­nal cold War goal and purpose—subversion and psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions direct­ed against coun­tries deemed hos­tile to US interests—remain the same. The only thing that did change about the BBG is that today, more of its broad­casts are tak­ing place online . . . .”

After doc­u­ment­ing Radio Free Europe’s growth from the Nazi/Vichy run Radio France dur­ing World War II and RCA’s David Sarnof­f’s involve­ment with the Tran­sra­dio Con­sor­tium (which com­mu­ni­cat­ed vital intel­li­gence to the Axis dur­ing the war), the pro­gram high­lights the involve­ment of Gehlen oper­a­tives in the oper­a­tions of Radio Free Europe, the sem­i­nal CIA broad­cast­ing out­lets.

The BBG (read “CIA”) became a major backer of the Tor Project: ” . . . . . . . . It was Wednes­day morn­ing, Feb­ru­ary 8, 2006, when Roger Din­gle­dine got the email he had been bad­ly wait­ing for. The Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors had final­ly agreed to back the Tor Project. . . . With­in a year, the agency increased Tor’s con­tract to a quar­ter mil­lion dol­lars, and then bumped it up again to almost a mil­lion just a few years lat­er. The rela­tion­ship also led to major con­tracts with oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies, boost­ing Tor’s mea­ger oper­at­ing bud­get to sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars a year. . . .”

Yasha Levine sums up the essence of the Tor Project: ” . . . . The Tor Project was not a rad­i­cal indie orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing The Man. For all intents and pur­pos­es, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Man’s right hand. . . . inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence reveals Tor’s close col­lab­o­ra­tion with the BBG and mul­ti­ple oth­er wings of the US gov­ern­ment, in par­tic­u­lar those that dealt with for­eign pol­i­cy and soft-pow­er pro­jec­tion. Mes­sages describe meet­ings, train­ings, and con­fer­ences with the NSA, CIA, FBI and State Depart­ment. . . . The fund­ing record tells the sto­ry even more pre­cise­ly. . . . Tor was sub­sist­ing almost exclu­sive­ly on gov­ern­ment con­tracts. By 2008, that includ­ed  con­tracts with DARPA, the Navy, the BBG, and the State Depart­ment as well as Stan­ford Research Insti­tute’s Cyber-Threat Ana­lyt­ics pro­gram. . . .” 

Next, we begin chron­i­cling the career of Jacob Appel­baum. A devo­tee of Ayn Rand, he became one of Tor’s most impor­tant employ­ees and pro­mot­ers. “. . . . With­in months of get­ting the job, he assumed the role of offi­cial Tor Project spokesman and began pro­mot­ing Tor as a pow­er­ful weapon against gov­ern­ment oppres­sion. . . . Over the next sev­er­al years, Din­gledine’s reports back to the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] were filled with descrip­tions of Appel­baum’s suc­cess­ful out­reach. . . .”

Intro­duc­ing a top­ic to be more ful­ly explored in our next pro­gram, we note Appel­baum’s piv­otal role in the Wik­iLeaks oper­a­tion and his role in the adop­tion of Tor by Wik­iLeaks: ” . . . . Appel­baum decid­ed to attach him­self to the Wik­iLeaks cause. He spent a few weeks with Assange and the orig­i­nal Wik­iLeaks crew in Ice­land as they pre­pared their first major release and helped secure the site’s anony­mous sub­mis­sions sys­tem using Tor’s hid­den ser­vice fea­ture, which hid the phys­i­cal loca­tion of Wik­iLeaks servers and in the­o­ry made them much less sus­cep­ti­ble to sur­veil­lance and attack. From then on, the Wik­iLeaks site proud­ly adver­tised Tor: ‘secure, anony­mous, dis­trib­uted net­work for max­i­mum secu­ri­ty.’ . . . . Appel­baum did his best to be Assange’s right-hand man. He served as the orga­ni­za­tion’s offi­cial Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive and bailed the founder of Wik­iLeaks out of tough spots when the heat from US author­i­ties got too hot. Appel­baum became so inter­twined with Wik­iLeaks that appar­ent­ly some staffers talked about him lead­ing the orga­ni­za­tion if some­thing were to hap­pen to Assange. . . . Assange gave Appel­baum and Tor wide cred­it for help­ing Wik­iLeaks. ‘Jake has been a tire­less pro­mot­er behind the scenes of our cause,’ he told a reporter. ‘Tor’s impor­tance to Wik­iLeaks can­not be under­es­ti­mat­ed.’ With those words, Appel­baum and the Tor Project became cen­tral heroes in the Wik­iLeaks saga, right behind Assange. . . .”