Two unanticipated events in 2016 completely shocked our ruling class: the election of Trump in the U.S. and the Brexit vote in the U.K. Our elites did not respond by examining the disconnect between their core assumptions and the will of the people. Instead they decided that, sure, democracy is all fine and well, but naturally, democracy must be protected from these unruly people.
After all, the people often don’t know what’s good for them. So those who know better must acquire the capacity to monitor and control the will of the people if we are to ‘defend democracy’. The means for doing this in the digital age, our ruling class divined, is by monitoring populations’ behaviors and shaping their thinking by controlling the flow of information online. The idea of censorship once again became chic.
Birth of the Censorship Leviathan
In the wake of Trump and Brexit, the Anglosphere Surveillance State, birthed following 9/11, gave birth in turn to its natural offspring, the Censorship Leviathan. There are 434 federal agencies in the Federal Register — most of which the average American cannot name. A little-known agency in our vast administrative state, called CISA — the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency — was erected in the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016. The following year CISA turned its attention from cyberattacks and foreign threats against our critical infrastructure to threats — whether foreign or domestic — against what Director Jen Easterly called our “cognitive infrastructure”. For the uninitiated, our cognitive infrastructure consists of the thoughts inside your head. These, naturally, need to be protected from bad ideas, defined as ideas the Government or its unelected officials do not like.
CISA quickly became a clearinghouse for what Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex: an interlocking network of federal agencies and quasi-private (i.e., mostly Government-funded) nonprofits, including some housed at universities like Stanford and the University of Washington, which do the Government’s bidding. Starting in 2017, this censorship industry — and it is an industry, complete with training programs and career opportunities for college grads — worked around the clock to flag posts or accounts the Government wanted removed. Government officials then forwarded these accounts to social media companies, pressuring the companies by wielding the big stick of Government power if they refused to comply.
The Censorship Leviathan grew massively during Covid. Along with my colleagues Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, I found myself caught in the gears of the Government’s censorship machinery for, well, threatening your cognitive infrastructure — specifically by challenging the Government’s preferred pandemic policies like lockdowns, school closures, universal masking and vaccine mandates. The three of us joined a federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, filed by the state Attorney-Generals from Missouri and Louisiana; we were later joined by two other private plaintiffs, health freedom advocate Jill Hines and journalist Jim Hoft.
Shortly after we filed this case, almost a year ago, I wrote:
This evidence [we presented to the court] suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal Government’s executive branch in U.S. history. Period, full stop. Even wartime propaganda efforts never reached this level of censorship, nor did the Government in days past have the power of today’s social media at its disposal.
On July 4th of this year, judge Terry Doughty granted our motion for a preliminary injunction, striking the first major blow against the government’s Censorship Leviathan. (The Government appealed the injunction to the 5th Circuit and we are awaiting an expedited hearing.) In the injunction ruling, the judge echoed my claim, writing: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” Perhaps he chose to release the ruling on Independence Day to drive home the point.
New Tentacles
This is clearly a strong claim but, as I have previously argued, an entirely accurate one. Before the digital age, censorship cases typically involved the Government suppressing one publisher, one article or book, or one source. In this case, we have a Government-funded, Government-coordinated ‘misinformation’ industry responsible for censoring hundreds of thousands of Americans on social media tens of millions of times. The breadth and scope of the Censorship Leviathan’s reach is difficult to fathom and would have been impossible to achieve without the previously constructed digital infrastructure of the Surveillance State.
A few days after the injunction ruling, the House Judiciary Committee released a report detailing that the FBI had pressured social media companies to censor Americans on behalf of the Ukrainian intelligence agency (the SBU) — an agency that, according to President Zelensky, had been infiltrated by Russian collaborators. Documents obtained through congressional subpoena revealed that the FBI directed Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube to censor thousands of accounts on behalf of the SBU, which included an American journalist and a U.S. State Department account.
When Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, failed to take immediate action on these flagged posts, an FBI agent offered to provide a “legal process” though which the company could act. As the Committee report explained, the FBI agent “suggested concocting a legal justification to support the removal of the flagged accounts if Meta did not find that the posts and comments violated its terms of service”. In response, Meta opened a 24/7 channel to respond to the SBU’s requests.
The congressional committee’s report confirmed previous reporting from investigative journalist Lee Fang. Illia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told Fang how their authorities defined ‘disinformation’ broadly:
When people ask me, “How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?” Indeed, it is very difficult in such an information flow. I say, “Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.” Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.
In short, Americans are now being censored not only by our own Government, but by Ukrainian intelligence agents — or possibly by Russian agents posing as Ukrainian intelligence agents. Hollywood screenwriters could make this the plotline of the next Mission Impossible movie, but it might come off as just too implausible and absurd to moviegoers. The House Committee report also noted that the Department of Justice routed censorship requests from other foreign governments, including European countries and the European Union.
The Surveillance State
During Covid, the federal Government saw fit not only to censor your voice online but to monitor your private behaviour for compliance with Government directives.
In May of 2022 we learned that during the previous two years, the CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed Covid lockdown orders. According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the CDC used phone location data to monitor schools and churches and planned to also use the data for at least 21 applications beyond Covid. These include, among other applications, monitoring curfews, neighbour-to-neighbour visits, visits to churches and other places of worship, school visits, visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses, as well as exposure to certain building types, urban areas and violence.
Although the data purchased by the CDC was aggregated to show trends, research has demonstrated that unmasking specific users from these aggregated mobility datasets is quite feasible. One research team studied 15 months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and published its results in Nature: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the [mobile phone] carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal [data] points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”
Evidence also emerged recently that the CIA has been using unauthorised digital surveillance to spy on Americans. Even the ACLU expressed alarm when newly declassified documents revealed that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information. As it noted: “This surveillance is done without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.” By consequence, “These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop.”
U.S. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for the declassification and investigation of relevant CIA documents. In a letter of April 13th 2021, which they made public, the two senators expressed concern that the CIA programme was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — FISA] collection.” Despite Congress’s clear intent, with the support of the American people, to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warn, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”
There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments of mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance — often referred to with the euphemism ‘bulk collection’. The last decade has seen such measures passed in the U.K., France, Australia, India, Sweden and other countries — not to mention the AI enabled facial- and gate-recognition surveillance in China, technology that President Xi Jinping is already exporting to eager rogue regimes around the globe.
The Beast and Its Offspring
Political theorist Eric Voegelin, who studied the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, noted that the common feature of all such regimes was not concentration camps, or mass surveillance, or secret police — as horrifying as all these things are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions. These regimes begin by monopolising what counts as rationality — what counts as acceptable public knowledge — and then place any dissidents outside the pale of rational conversation. Surveillance of dissident thoughts and behaviours and censorship of dissenting opinions then expand together.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan reaches the gates of Hell on his way to tempt our first parents in Eden, he meets two grotesque monsters guarding the exit. The first monster, Sin, explains that he sprung from Satan’s own head; this monster subsequently delivered the second spectre, Death. Just as the former by necessity birthed the latter, so also the post-9/11 Surveillance State was destined to eventually birth the Censorship Leviathan. These two beasts now guard the gates of permissible public discourse. The seven-year-old Censorship Leviathan cannot be slain unless we also reign in the 20-year-old of the Surveillance State, which gave birth to it.
My job as a physician specialising in psychiatry is to help individuals regain control over their own behaviours and thoughts — to recover their interior freedom when it is impaired by disease, addiction or neurosis. As someone who specialises in treating mental disorders, I can attest: when the Government takes upon itself the task of monitoring and shaping your behaviour (through surveillance) and your thoughts (through censorship), we have a perfectly apt name for this.
It’s called mind control.
Aaron Kheriaty MD is the Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Programme at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre and a senior fellow at the Zephyr Institute. This article was first published on the American Mind.
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The activities of this and many other large businesses has strayed into political campaigning. If it was any good at its job ElCom would call for registration and reports from them as political campaigning is a controlled activity.
When there is even a single political party that does not support the narrative of the Westminster parties, such campaigns are party political and should be limited according to the law.
Hear, hear.
One proviso – Elcom are absolutely useless and as an official of a minor political party I know of what I speak.
It’s political if it’s trying to change the opinion of someone on anything. Buy TOFU because it tastes great and looks really good! is a pure commercial, Buy TOFU to help Israel to fight Arabian terrorists (to be replaced with Buy TOFU to help the Palestinians to drive off the foreign invaders in muslim countries) is a political statement, despite the plan is to sell more TOFU in both cases.
This bank is 39% owned by the tax payer and thus you would think the Government has a duty to hold the senior management to account for their blatant engagement in spying on their customers and engagement in woke and green politics. But we know the Tories won’t reprimand them as they are comfortable with spying on us all and committed to the Net Zero scam too.
It is NOT just a matter for the Government to act in loco UK taxpayers, even if it could participate in AGMs as a competent entity with a “shareholding” ; there is a clear, if only potential, conflict of interest in that the Government with an 80 seat and declining majority makes the/any Law which may impact NatWest….legal challenges would surely result?
The much bigger issue, IMHO, is The Faded Rose’s actions as CEO of an FCA/PRA regulated business – how and by whom is she being/was she held to account? The Board; Nope – expressed total confidence in her and then endorsed her resignation; instigated an independent enquiry in NF’s debunking from a Legal firm with anti Brexit “form” at the top which SHOULD have removed them from the candidates ( difficult if only one…) or seen that firm recuse themselves if they had a developed professionally ethical compass. Their Phase 1 conclusion that NF’s debunking was due to “commercial” reasons is …interesting; if a multi phase review concludes at Phase 1 “nothing to see”, what the hell are they reviewing in Phase 2, 3, 4…..?
No, the FCA is the competent authority to scrutinise her actions, and those of her employer ( If she was a member of ANY professional body with a Code of Conduct, they would be also)
Ms Rose admitted to a a breach of client confidentiality; she held several Senior Manager functions (SMF) with NatWest but crucially with Coutts – all of which were subject to significantly higher scrutiny by the FCA. SMF compliance was/is much much more stringent than ordinary, non SMF mortals especially since the FCA removed individual “regularity approval” to work in an FCA regulated business ( that decision was devolved to……..the employer……very problematical IMHO ) She had to be an FCA “approved person” to hold these positions…..see here but be warned it is a labyrinth: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/approved-persons/senior-management-functions; how can her admitted indiscretion not attract that “approval” process..?
The FCA issued an initial whitewash to a crescendo of criticism – not heard anything since then*. If her membership of the NAtWest Group’s pension scheme has a “lien” clause – to enable any losses incurred by the employer through “negligent acts or omissions” by the employee (very unlikely but not unknown) – who is going to check that out? Perhaps the Board might ask the Trustees because of this gobsmacking revelation but somehow I do not think that is going to happen:
““While no bank, building society or payment firm reported to us that they had closed accounts primarily due to someone’s political views, further work is needed for us to be sure,” said FCA boss Nikhil Rathi.”*
That statement would be laughable if it was not so damned serious by implication. Meanwhile Dame Rose appears to be being considered to be rewarded for deliberate breaking of regulations prescribed by law……and which appear to be endorsed, at the time by the Board under Howard Davies…an ex FSA Chairman.
Can “it” get any worse?
Thank-you for that valuable insight into the regulatory aspect of this issue. More homework for me!
Thanks for this.
“The bank’s app asks its users to try adding tofu and lentils to their diets as substitutes for eating meat.”
Lentils are good for greening the planet as they turn the eater in to a fart factory as do most pulses. I’m not sure about tofu. I have only tried it once but it is disgusting. I am not a fussy eater and am known as someone who doesn’t let much passed the pot.
Doubtless Nut West have failed to understand the gas stoking attributes of pulses and legumes.
It’s funny.
Methane is a greenhouse gas too. No smoking.
That should be (some) people employed by NatWest abuse a position which enables them to access customer data for (commerical self-interest driven) political preaching.
Quite. NatWest users: is it possible to decline this spying?
That’s a good question. If this is UCE¹, sending it should be illegal. OTOH, there’s probably a If you don’t want to be informed about Really Important Stuff™, uncheck this box control somewhere. Don’t install the app likely works, too.
¹ unsolicited commercial e-mail
It seems that, at the minute, this is a function on the App that customers have the option of using which is fine, although “right on” eco-worriers will no doubt already be doing most if not all of the things the App suggests. If/when it becomes impossible to opt out of being sent this propaganda is the time to worry about it. Until then if NatWest want to send out this kind of advice to people who want to waste their time reading it I don’t see the problem.
Like MPs the only thing these immensely arrogant people/corporations understand is rejection of them at the ballot box or their product. Just a suggestion- Switch to another bank and collect £200 and donate the money to organisations like DS and TCW who give expose to the liberty threatening politicisation of industry.
This politicisation of corporations has Larry Finks and others in the Investment bank industry all over it.
Start with moneysupermarket for a list of offers.
I wish I banked with them, so I could leave indignantly.
Where would you go?
Well done far as I’m aware my bank don’t do this yet, although the sheep effect means it’s probably only a matter of time
Lloyds or 1st Direct will give you £175 if you switch to them, it’s so easy to do.
Telling people to repair broken electronic devices themselves is not sensible advice unless they know what they are doing. Plant based alternatives to milk are not ‘eco’, if you care about that sort of thing. Thousands of acres of almond trees, necessarily expensively processed, just so middle class hypocrites can pretend they are doing something to ‘save the planet’ by drinking almond milk. In actual fact such extensive mono-culture (plus the exploitation of the low paid labourers needed to care for the trees) is damaging to the environment and prevents more useful food crops being grown. All these milk alternatives are expensive to produce, and some of them are no better than drinking a can of coke, the sugar content is so high. What could be easier than just squeezing a cows teat and getting a drink of milk instantly – if a bit warm maybe!
Exactly.
Just more processed crap food. But natural unadulterated products aren’t conducive to the health of pharma & corporate bank balances.
What’s a bit of hypocrisy between friends if “you’re saving the planet”?
NatWest is doing a grand job of alienating customers this year – first the Farago and now this.
My wife worked for them and hated it.
My son tried to get an overdraft for a start-up and was told his business plan was unrealistic. He exceeded the first year t/o prediction and now owns several businesses employing 70+ people and is quite a rich young man. Santander were the beneficiaries.
Another reason for using cash only, I guess.
Repairing electronics devices? They are designed to be unrepairable. eg laptops, that used to have removable batteries, but no longer have that. Why are plant based products more enviromentally friendly than meat based products? Ploughing grassland releases the carbon from the grass, and grazing animals are important in conservation. Anyway, Natwest need to persuade places to China, India, Russia etc etc to adopt dramatic CO2 cutting – they won’t has they realise it is ecominc suicide. So that means the West will (try to) cut out CO2, committing economic suicide, and make diddly squat difference to the planet. I know, why don’t they ban smart phones as they must use up loads more energy that the old phones? Mm I suspect not as they don’t suit the agenda.
It isn’t any banks business to interfere in our shopping habits. They are there to do banking. I don’t need Greta Thunberg as my bank manager.
Here is an idea for NatWest. As they are so keen to provide information about carbon footprints, could they please provide the carbon footprints of their board of directors and their top management. As a benchmark.
That way when they show each custoner’s “footprint”, the customer can compare it against that of the NatWest board members and the top management. And if it’s less, which it probably is, then they can sit tight and not change anything until people with a bigger “footprint” sort that out first.
Who gets sued when you try to repair an electronic device yourself and electrocute yourself or set fire to your home?
“NatWest is telling customers to stop eating meat…”
If I may…
NatWest is telling customers to stop banking with them if they’ve got any sense.
De-bank them of your custom, like any other provider trying to pull this sort of woke nonsense.
Aside from the creepy, invasive data-scraping for social credit score reasons, unevidenced and blatantly propagandised ideology and dietary suggestions to people who might not actually be able to be vegetarian (yes, that is a thing) – I wonder what commercial food and clothing retailers, airlines and travel companies think of this and the consquences for their profit margins?
Use cash and they won’t know where you spent it
leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
They have lost sight of profitability. I wonder who their shareholders are? Let’s all be bloody stupid and get £10m golden goodbyes.
This is the kind of thing I see in my local newspaper every week which has simply become a party political broadcast for the GREEN party. Last week they were advising us all not to buy a new lawnmower next spring but instead to borrow one from a neighbour down the street. I can imagine the look on Mr Smith’s face when I knock in his door to ask for a loan his mower all summer so I can “save the planet”. I am also pretty sure that the company not far from me that sells mowers and garden equipment will not be too happy that the local paper is trying to put them out of business by encouraging us all not to buy their products. This Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) that has seeped into government and corporations is a diabolical disgrace. Nat West like many other big businesses have decided to impose Eco Communism on us all and only by waking up to this tyranny and removing savings from them will they learn we will not tolerate this. ——At the moment we seem to be doing just that though. But let’s see how woke all these people are when their sales and profits drop like a stone, and they will U turn like all cowrads do. eg Disney with their Snow White Wokery holding back the film till they review their “inclusive” crap because they fear losing money big style.
Bankers – the first letter should be replaced by the second letter in the qwerty keyboard.
I’ve moved a big chunk of my money out of Natwest exactly because of this. their Sinister app measures your spending in “Carbon Foot print ” & if you opt out, it still calculates it n the background. It’s 1984 Banking
I wouldn’t mind being advised on how to reduce environmental harm but only if it’s an opt in option though I prefer to make my own mind up about this from more reliable sources than a bank! I’m more concerned with the illegal and immoral breach of privacy of Rose et al, compounded by her being up for a.huge bonus, plus the lack of an overhaul of other NE personnel involved in this scandal. It seems like confirmations if needed that it’s one rule for them another for us.