Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG – Get Rating) CAO Amie Thuener O’toole sold 42 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $2,298.63, for a total transaction of $96,542.46. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer now owns 1,181 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $2,714,682.03. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this link.
Amie Thuener O’toole also recently made the following trade(s):Get Alphabet alerts:
On Tuesday, May 3rd, Amie Thuener O’toole sold 42 shares of Alphabet stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $2,335.30, for a total transaction of $98,082.60.
On Friday, April 1st, Amie Thuener O’toole sold 42 shares of Alphabet stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $2,800.20, for a total transaction of $117,608.40.
NASDAQ GOOG traded up $72.18 on Thursday, hitting $2,354.92. 1,373,569 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 1,582,973. The company has a market cap of $1.55 trillion, a PE ratio of 21.30, a PEG ratio of 1.07 and a beta of 1.13. Alphabet Inc. has a 12 month low of $2,044.16 and a 12 month high of $3,042.00. The stock has a fifty day moving average of $2,464.33 and a 200-day moving average of $2,675.68. The company has a current ratio of 2.87, a quick ratio of 2.85 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.06.
Shares of Alphabet are scheduled to split on Monday, July 18th. The 20-1 split was announced on Tuesday, February 1st. The newly minted shares will be payable to shareholders after the closing bell on Friday, July 15th.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG – Get Rating) last released its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 26th. The information services provider reported $24.62 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of $25.51 by ($0.89). Alphabet had a net margin of 27.57% and a return on equity of 30.18%. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $26.29 earnings per share. On average, analysts expect that Alphabet Inc. will post 112.46 earnings per share for the current year.
GOOG has been the subject of a number of research analyst reports. Tigress Financial upped their price objective on shares of Alphabet from $3,540.00 to $3,670.00 in a research report on Friday, March 18th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft decreased their price target on shares of Alphabet from $3,150.00 to $2,900.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 27th. Canaccord Genuity Group upped their price target on shares of Alphabet from $3,350.00 to $3,500.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research report on Wednesday, February 2nd. Cowen upped their price target on shares of Alphabet from $3,500.00 to $3,600.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research report on Wednesday, February 2nd. Finally, Wedbush restated an “outperform” rating on shares of Alphabet in a research report on Wednesday, April 20th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and thirty have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, Alphabet presently has a consensus rating of “Buy” and a consensus price target of $3,308.77.
Several institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in GOOG. Morgan Stanley lifted its stake in shares of Alphabet by 2.1% in the second quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 2,433,132 shares of the information services provider’s stock valued at $6,098,209,000 after buying an additional 50,601 shares in the last quarter. New World Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Alphabet in the third quarter valued at about $724,000. EagleClaw Capital Managment LLC raised its holdings in shares of Alphabet by 3.5% in the third quarter. EagleClaw Capital Managment LLC now owns 2,946 shares of the information services provider’s stock valued at $7,853,000 after purchasing an additional 99 shares during the last quarter. Legacy Wealth Planning LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Alphabet in the third quarter valued at about $205,000. Finally, BloombergSen Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Alphabet by 1.4% in the third quarter. BloombergSen Inc. now owns 45,471 shares of the information services provider’s stock valued at $121,180,000 after purchasing an additional 616 shares during the last quarter. 31.20% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.
About Alphabet
Alphabet Inc provides various products and platforms in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Canada, and Latin America. It operates through Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets segments. The Google Services segment offers products and services, including ads, Android, Chrome, hardware, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Play, Search, and YouTube.
So Alphabet stock doesn’t seem to be currently underperforming. If the cause of all these evolutions is not something happening in the present, Gates and the Alphabet CAO could very well have information about something in the future that determined them to take action. Insider info?
As for publicly available info on Alphabet’s future, the only notable event announced is:
In short, that means Alphabet shares aren’t many and they are expensive. It also means the current owners are not trading them enough to create speculative value growth. So they split every share in 20 tinier shares with the same total value. Those are bite-sized shares that smaller sharks can take on.
What that also means is that Alphabet needs funds and the little closed circle of rich elite stockholders isn’t providing enough, the actual business is not making much either, so they need to raise more from market speculations. The strategy chosen to achieve this: They lower their pants a bit for easier plebeian access, in hope they will get access to more plebeian pockets in return.
While all this info might not be enough to derive definitive and specific conclusion about the future of these two pillars of the digital dome, namely Alphabet and Microsoft, a few things can be said with close to 100% certainty:
Extraordinary evolutions have extraordinary causes.
The Military BioTech Complex will have to transform and adapt to the extraordinary change it’s causing. That will reflect in its corporate avatars.
If Twitter is going through a self-inflicted crisis, it’s hardly possible for Google to fully avoid something similar, for the same reasons. I’d guess Google should suffer even more from user backlash by now, because their offer is even easier to replace, but they’re just better at hiding it and there’s no Elon Musk to look under their hood.
Microsoft’s public image is inextricably tied to Bill Gates’, whose credibility took the most spectacular nosedive last couple of years.
These previous four statements might be one and the same.
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Remember: “The war abroad always comes home”. And this one “starts with hyper-connectivity”.
“Cognitive warfare, when practiced effectively has strength, an insidious nature and disrupts our ordinary understandings and reactions to events. The term, cognitive warfare, requires some dissection and interpretation in the context of national security; broadly defined it is a disinformation process to psychologically wear down the receivers of the information. It is strategically spread through information resources like social media, networking, Internet resources, videos, photos taken out of context, simplistic resources like political cartoons and even well-planned websites that encourage the making of disinformation.”
Canada – NATO Innovation Challenge Fall 2021: Cognitive Warfare – 2021
Informational webinar on October 5th as Canada hosts the Fall 2021 NATO Innovation Challenge organized by Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM), Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) and the NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) iHub. Innovators will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the concept of Cognitive Warfare as well as the Innovation Challenge’s eligibility requirements, application process and timeline.
Commenting on the video above, The Gray Zone notes:
The other institution that is managing the Fall 2021 NATO Innovation Challenge on behalf of Canada’s Department of National Defense is the Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM).
A Canadian military officer who works with CANSOFCOM, Shekhar Gothi, was the final panelist in the October 5 NATO Association of Canada event. Gothi serves as CANSOFCOM’s “innovation officer” for Southern Ontario.
He concluded the event appealing for corporate investment in NATO’s cognitive warfare research.
The bi-annual Innovation Challenge is “part of the NATO battle rhythm,” Gothi declared enthusiastically.
Gothi reassured corporate investors that NATO will bend over backward to defend their bottom lines: “I can assure everyone that the NATO innovation challenge indicates that all innovators will maintain complete control of their intellectual property. So NATO won’t take control of that. Neither will Canada. Innovators will maintain their control over their IP.”
The comment was a fitting conclusion to the panel, affirming that NATO and its allies in the military-industrial complex not only seek to dominate the world and the humans that inhabit it with unsettling cognitive warfare techniques, but to also ensure that corporations and their shareholders continue to profit from these imperial endeavors.
Since the early days of the Alliance, NATO has played an essential role in promoting and enhancing civil preparedness among its member states. Article 3 of the NATO founding treaty establishes the principle of resilience, which requires all Alliance member states to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” This includes supporting the continuity of government, and the provision of essential services, including resilient civil communications systems.
A Taipei think tank and observers in Taiwan say China is trying to influence residents with “cognitive warfare,” hoping to reverse opposition to Beijing’s desired takeover of Taiwan so it can be accomplished without having to go to war.
Taiwanese attitudes have been drifting away from the mainland, especially among the younger generation, whose members see themselves “born independent” with no ties to China.
China’s effort, these analysts say, includes tactics ranging from military intimidation and propaganda to misinformation spread by its army of online trolls in a bid to manipulate public opinion. They say the complexity and frequency of the effort puts Taiwan on a constant defensive.
“Its ultimate goal is to control what’s between the ears. That is, your brain or how you think, which [Beijing] hopes leads to a change of behavior,” Tzeng Yi-suo, director of the cybersecurity division at the government-funded Institute of National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, told VOA.
Liberal democracies such as Taiwan, that ensure the free flow of information, are vulnerable to cognitive attacks by China, while China’s tightly controlled media and internet environment makes it difficult for democracies to counterattack, according to Tzeng.
China’s campaign has intensified since the outbreak of COVID-19, using official means such as flying military jets over Taiwan, and unofficial channels such as news outlets, social media and hackers to spread misinformation. The effort is aimed at dissuading Taiwan from pursuing actions contrary to Beijing’s interests, the report said.
China has used these tactics to attack Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration, undermine support for democracy and fuel Taiwan’s social tensions and political divide, it said.
NATO Releases Disturbing Stance on Cognitive Warfare
Cyber and economic warfare are often seen as the future of war. There is, however, a new type of warfare being discussed. It is called “cognitive warfare.”
Cognitive warfare, similar to information warfare, involves the the swaying of public opinion as a means of war. What differentiates the two, is that information warfare is simply defined as the manipulation of public opinion via propaganda. Cognitive warfare, on the other hand, involves the literal manipulation of the human brain. Seems far fetched? Well according to a NATO-sponsored study, it is now being classified as a “sixth domain” of warfare. While even acknowledging the horrific dangers of this type of warfare, the report goes on to claim NATO should develop the means to use cognitive warfare to get ahead of China and Russia. There is far from any proof that either countries are developing cognitive warfare capabilities, with reports of information warfare being falsely labelled as “cognitive warfare.” The NATO Association of Canada has even admitted that cognitive warfare is “one of the hottest topics” for the military alliance.
The fact that NATO is lying about the ambitions of its enemies when it comes to developmental warfare is not surprising. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has repeatedly exaggerated the threat of Russia in order to expand its influence eastward. Could the US government use these false pretexts in order to convince the public that cognitive control over our minds is necessary to defend ourselves? If you think that’s far fetched, then just look at how successful the government was in pushing for vaccines on children. Despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines for children are unnecessary (studies have shown children are more likely to die from the vaccine than COVID-19 itself), the government has successfully manipulated a large portion of the public into believing they are indeed necessary. In the future, will some people be convinced to willingly volunteer to have chips placed in their heads, in order to protect themselves from “Russian cognitive attacks”?
Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Lu Li-shih, a former teacher at the Republic of China Naval Academy, said: “This staged photograph is definitely ‘cognitive warfare’ to show the US doesn’t regard the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] as an immediate threat. “In the photo, Commander Briggs looks very relaxed with his feet up watching the Liaoning ship just a few thousand yards away, while his deputy is also sitting beside him, showing they take their PLA counterparts lightly.” One Hong Kong newspaper reported that the photo sent one clear message to China: “We’re watching you.” The image comes as the US and the Philippines begin two weeks of military drills in a show of force against China after hundreds of ships anchored off Whitsun reef last month.
COGNITIVE WARFARE
By Emily Bienvenue, Zac Rogers & Sian Troath May 14, 2019– THE COVE (Australian Defense publication)
The term cognitive warfare has entered the lexicon over the last couple of years. General David L. Goldfein (United States Air Force) remarked last year we are “transitioning from wars of attrition to wars of cognition”. Neuroscientist James Giordano has described the human brain as the battlefield of the 21st Century. Cognitive warfare represents the convergence of all that elements that have lived restlessly under the catch-all moniker of Information Warfare (IW) since the term’s emergence in the 1990s. However, military and intelligence organisations now grappling with this contentious new concept are finding cognitive warfare to be something greater than, or as Gestalt intended, different than, the sum of these parts. Cognitive warfare is IW with something added. As we begin to understand more about what has been added, awareness is growing that western military and intelligence organisations may have been caught playing the wrong game.
As Martin Libicki explained, IW burst onto the scene in the early 1990s in line with the shift from attrition-based to effects-based operations and the increasingly digitised and networked infrastructure underpinning contemporary warfare. It overarched lines of effort in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), electronic warfare (EW), psychological operations (PSYOPS), and cyber operations that in general raised the need to contend for and take advantage of control of information flows. These elements overlapped but remained disparate and lacked a unified concept and unity of effort. Despite the desire for integration being an ever-present agenda item, such unity did not eventuate and the individual streams continued to evolve, driven by more-or-less separate military and intelligence communities of interest.
The various elements under the IW construct were largely pursued throughout the ensuing period as adjuncts in support of objectives defined by the traditional remit of military organisations – namely, to deliver lethal kinetic effects on the battlefield. The War on Terror provided an unconventional sandbox for the refining of IW elements; but again, little impetus emerged for their drawing together under a unified concept. Influence operations across both cyber and human terrains remained episodic and an adjunct to a kinetic main effort – even while the separation between victory on the battlefield and the capacity for enduring political successes became starker. The disconnect should have been more unnerving for Western military organisations. The capacity for an adversary to contend for battlefield victory below the threshold of conventional conflict is only one aspect of asymmetry. The disconnect raises the more fundamental question of why, if battlefield superiority was demonstrably not resulting in political success, would a conventionally inferior opponent pursue such a pathway at all? What if strategic success – the causing of a preferable behaviour change in those with which we contend – could bypass the traditional battlefield altogether?
For the nation-state adversaries of the US and its allies, the disconnect provided an opportunity to observe and to learn. While the ‘winning without fighting’ ethos is a well understood heuristic of Chinese strategic culture, as Wirtz has suggested also, Russian strategic culture has consistently excelled at imagining some of the non-intuitive and strategic level implications of technological change. Much more than mere opportunism, Russia’s unfavourable geo-strategic circumstances, combined with its deep distrust of US intentions, forced it to render strategic level gains from a weakening hand. Here-in lies the temporary advantage it gained in finding and filling the gap between IW and cognitive warfare. As Clint Watts has surmised, where IW described a war ofinformation, the cognitive battlespace is a war for information as it is transformed into knowledge via the processes of cognition. The technologies of the networked digital age, conceived by the US and its allies as an accumulation of advantages on the conventional battlefield, and unleashed by the clamour for profit of the commercial sector, were transformed into a strategic gift for an imaginative adversary and thus presents us with the current dilemma. The convergence of IW into cognitive warfare has been forced upon us.
This gift emerged in the mid-2000s with the advent of hyper-connectivity, largely a product of the social media phenomenon and its attendant business model based on accessing the constant attention of the human brain. This phenomenon created the bridge between IW and cognitive war which has been exploited by an unscrupulous adversary. Hyper-connectivity created the opportunity to transform IW from a set of episodic activities, largely associated with operational lines-of-effort by military and intelligence practitioners in support of lethal and kinetic effects on the battlefield, into a single continuous effort to disrupt and deny the cognitive conditions in which whole societies are situated. Cognitive warfare gathers together the instruments of IW and takes us into the realm of ‘neuro-weapons’ – defined by Giordano as “anything that accesses the brain to contend against others”. When coordinated and directed at open liberal democratic societies, cognitive warfare has paid off in spades. The capacity of open societies to function – to sustain and renew the narratives upon which their superior material strength relies – gets quickly scrambled when certain cognitive processes are exposed to manipulation.
It remains an item of curiosity how American and allied military and strategic culture, imbued as it is with the insights of John Boyd and many others, has been slow to recognise the shift in orientation. Boyd’s OODA loop may be one of the most bastardised concepts in modern military strategy, but its central insights are absolutely prescient for the age of cognitive warfare. The loop’s second “O” – Orientation – subsumes each of its other points. Getting orientation wrong, no matter how well an actor can Observe, how quickly they can Decide, and how concisely they can Act, can nonetheless mean the actor is caught playing the wrong game. It centrality is made patently clear for anyone who actually reads Boyd, or any of a number of good biographies of his work. It is imperative that this strategic culture understands the way in which its own orientation has been turned against it.
As digitised and networked warfare has matured and evolved over the last 25 years into its contemporary iteration of Multi-Domain Battle (MDB), it has pursued better observation through superior ISR, better decision-making through big data and machine learning, and better action through the constant advance of military-technical capabilities. Its orientation, however, has remained the same. As Albert Palazzo has iterated, MDB remains oriented toward a military problem solvable by lethal kinetic means in which political success is considered as a follow-on phase and to which influence operations across cyber and human terrain remain adjunct lines of effort. What is becoming clearer is that the age of cognitive warfare is highlighting the joints and fissures in this basic construct to an unprecedented extent. General Michael Hayden has made this point in his 2018 book, The Assault on Intelligence.
Cognitive warfare presents us with an orientation problem. Adversary actors have strategised to avoid a confrontation with US and allied forces at their strongest point – namely, in high intensity conventional warfare. They have pursued gains in various domains that remain under the threshold of inducing a conventional military response. While US and allied forces have mused over ways to bolster below-the-threshold capabilities, the adversary has been busy changing the rules of the meta-contest. By denying, disrupting, and countering the narratives that underpin US and allied legitimacy, and by stifling our capacity to regenerate the preferred narrative via sophisticated and targeted disinformation operations, the adversary has changed the context within which force and the threat of force is situated. In other words, the diplomatic power of the traditional force-in-being of allied militaries to influence the behaviour of others is being diminished. Furthermore, the actual deployment of lethal kinetic capabilities will be subject to a similar reorientation where and when they occur. Simply put, lethal kinetic capability, as the traditional remit of military organisations, has undergone a reorientation at the hands of an adversary enabled by the hyper-connected digital age to manipulate its context to an unprecedented extent.
Cognitive war is not the fight most professional military practitioners wanted. A little discussed aspect is the extent to which our military and strategic culture perceives it as a deeply dishonourable fight. A cultural bias – if not a genuine cognitive blind spot – is at work and has slowed our response. But national security, before it is about winning kinetic battles and before it is centred on the profession of arms, is at its core about ensuring that people are safe to live their lives: it is about keeping the peace and protecting the population from harmful interference. This includes the harm that disrupts our capacity to conduct our collective social, economic, and political lives on our own terms.
About the Authors:
Emily Bienvenue, Zac Rogers & Sian Troath
Dr Emily Bienvenue is a Senior Analyst in the Defence Science and Technology Group’s, Joint and Operations Analysis Division. Her research interests include trust as a strategic resource, the changing nature of warfare, and competition below the threshold of conflict.
The views expressed here are her own and do not represent the official view of the Australian Defence Department.
Zac Rogers is a senior researcher at the Centre for United States and Asia Policy Studies and PhD candidate at the College of Business, Government, and Law, Flinders University of South Australia.
Sian Troath is a PhD candidate at Flinders University, and a combined Flinders University-DST Group research associate working on Modelling Complex Warfighting (MCW) Strategic Response (SR) 4 – Modelling Complex Human Systems. Her areas of expertise are international relations theory, trust theory, Australian foreign policy, Australia-Indonesia relations, and Anglo-American relations.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Australian Army, the Department of Defence or the Australian Government.
Ownership of mainstream media and popular social media is imperative to control desired narrative during psychological and military operations. In the last 30 years, it has been the accessibility and freedom of the internet which has been invaluable for the communication of independent and objective analysis which is often evidence-based rather than information used in cognitive warfare for perception manipulation.
We now live in a time where the powers that shouldn’t be are scrambling to find methods to disrupt these free lines of communication without appearing to be an all-out assault on freedom-of-speech; so the current methodology is slow implementation of concepts like “community standards” violations to shut down people who are often disseminating information that government does not want communicated. When a new forum is formed that allows freedom of speech—that forum quickly attracts attention and efforts are quickly made to either buy out the forum and disparage it publicly — sometimes labeling it as politically “right-wing” which automatically loses most users who may identify as politically “left-wing.”
With the popular accessibility of the internet starting in the 1990s, the exchanges of information and ideas have been facilitated throughout the globe. Before internet popularity, channels of information were mainly held by mainstream media corporations. In the last twenty-five years, billions of people worldwide have been exchanging information instantly outside of official government and corporate filters. These developments have fractured the monopoly on information once held by government and corporations on behalf of elite interests worldwide.
A significant percentage of the global population still blindly trusts corporate mainstream media and prestigious academic sources of news and information without verification. These same people instinctively avoid ‘alternative’ sources of news and information. However, a growing number of people have awoken to the realization that mainstream media sources of information are agenda-driven and often purposely deceiving while engaging in systemic censorship. These are the people more inclined to seek alternative sources of information and communicate using channels free from corporate and academic monopolies. The current battle to disturb and eventually shut down these channels are extremely important to one-world-government social-engineers. This is a major battleground in today’s cognitive warfare.
As we enter the mid-2020s, it will likely be increasingly difficult to freely exchange evidence-based and independent research and analysis on the internet. There is a cognitive war against freedom of information in the emerging totalitarian global scheme. Unlike conventional warfare, cognitive warfare is everywhere a communication device is used. Independent researchers, analysts, and journalists are being disrupted and banned from forums like YouTube and Facebook.
To counteract cognitive warfare and ultimately avoid a one-world-government dystopia—engage your neighbors and build local and personal relationships of information exchange and commerce as opposed to relying on long-distance electronic communications. Get off the grid as much as possible and reverse the psyop of ‘social-distancing’ that the Covid-19 operation has promoted for the last year and a half.
OTHER ANGLES
Cognitive Electronic Warfare: Conceptual Design and Architecture – 2020
Computing revolution is heralding the transition from digital to cognitive that is the third significant era in the history of computer technology: the cognitive era. It is about the use of computers to mimic human thought processes, such as perception, memory, learning and decision-making in highly dynamic environments. In recent years, there is a growing research interest in the development of cognitive capabilities in radio frequency technologies. Using cognition-based techniques, a radar system would be able to perceive its operational environment, fine-tune and accordingly adjust its emission parameters, such as the pulse width, pulse repetition interval, and transmitter power, to perform its assigned task optimally. It is certain that traditional electronic warfare (EW) methods, which rely on pre-programmed attack strategies, will not be able to efficiently engage with such a radar threat. Therefore, the next generation of EW systems needs to be enhanced with cognitive abilities so that they can make autonomous decisions in response to changing situations, and cope with new, unknown radar signals. Because the system architecture is a blueprint, this paper presents a conceptual cognitive EW architecture that carries out both electronic support and electronic attack operations to synthesize close-to-optimal countermeasures subject to performance goals.
The cognitive warfare: Aspects of new strategic thinking
Combining the strategic observations on revolutionary war – those made by Colonel Trinquier during the war in Algeria, in particular–with US strategy regarding information warfare, the authors Harbulot and Lucas, leading experts at the French École de guerre économique, and Moinet, Director of the DESS (Intelligence économique et développement des Entreprises) – place their emphasis on the profoundly innovative and strategic role played by information warfare and on its implications for companies. Naturally enough, it emerges with clarity that the authors’ intention is to utilize cognitive warfare in defense of the interests of French companies against their US competitors.
It is undeniable – in the opinion of the authors – that the date of September 11, 2001, represented a change in strategic thinking of fundamental importance. Undoubtedly, the war in the Persian Gulf, the US military intervention in Somalia, and the conflicts in former Yugoslavia had already presaged – even if in terms not yet precisely defined – an evolution of military strategy in the direction of newer strategic scenarios. It is enough to consider – the authors observe – that at the time of the invasion of Kuwait, US public opinion was mobilized following a disinformation process planned at military level or more exactly, at psychological warfare level. In this regard, it is sufficient to recall how the televised landing of US troops on the beaches of Mogadishu, the televised lynching of a US Army soldier enabled the marginalization of the politico-military dimension of the civil war in progress. Yet the importance ascribed to the manipulation of information was determined by the conviction – which proved to be correct – that the absolute mastery of the production of knowledge both upstream (the educational system) and downstream (Internet, media audio-visual means) can ensure – the authors emphasize – the long-lasting legitimacy of the control of world affairs.
Yet in light of the American political-military choices and reflections on the revolutionary war in Algeria, French strategy felt the need to define in strict terms exactly what information warfare is. First of all, the expression used in the context of French strategy is the one of cognitive warfare defined as the capacity to use knowledge for the purpose of conflict. In this regard, it is by no mere chance that Rand Corporation information warfare specialists John Arquilla and David Rundfeldt assert the domination of information to be fundamental to American strategy. Secondly, the ample and systematic use of information warfare by the US creates the need – in geographical-strategic terms–for the European Union to do some serious thinking on cognitive warfare. On the other hand, the absence of legal regulation of manipulation of knowledge in the architecture of security inherited at the end of the Cold War can only lead to serious concern above all for economic security of European companies and must consequently bring about the formulation of a strategy of dissuasion and the use of subversive techniques that must be capable of creating barriers against attempts at destabilization.
The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure.
DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August.
DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.
Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.
The Intercept
If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society's cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.https://t.co/KXrmaHX4SJ
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To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
For my mother, who has just buried my father, passed away from a very suspicious heart event involving some clots. She had to bury him in my absence, because the Military BioTech Complex holds us prisoners on two different continents. I had to bury myself in work to keep it together.
Work in progress, I will keep adding pieces to the Tetris until it goes away. Please return regularly for updates, this is a very long and fascinating story that should change the worldview for most people.
“This is to request that the current retention allowance [(b)(6) redaction] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted to a permanent pay adjustment in the amount [(b)(6) redaction] over his base pay of [(b)(6) redaction] in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.”
For past several years, DARPA has been pioneering a powerful new type of countermeasure against infectious disease called gene-encoded antibodies. They work by providing cells with genetic instructions for producing one or more highly protective antibodies against a given threat. pic.twitter.com/h2gz8fuOXJ
Via the ADEPT program, DARPA was an early investor in Moderna's mRNA therapeutics & vaccines. The company announced today their experimental coronavirus vaccine, built in part on this groundbreaking work, is nearly 95% effective at preventing illness: https://t.co/OCi5MEQiVg
First, in the US, Military and an emerging petrochemical industry with strong roots in agriculture but expanding into health, among others. The Rockefellers were the main force driving this expansion in the US and bridging over the ocean to Germany, the most advanced country in terms of chemical industrialization. But it was mostly Crown-controlled and Rothschild-controlled from the City of London, through their many henchmen.
After a few good collaborative experiences, the Military and Pharmafia decided they have a future together, and they bought up the Academia to help with the labs and the brains, as both industries already had a foot in the door there.
Two world wars demonstrated there’s hardly any limit to what they can achieve together.
The Cold War is then used as an excuse to develop more surveillance and population control tools. From these efforts spring1 out Silicon Valley and the Internet.
Before the end of 20th century, Big Pharma and Big Tech are fused by all means: capital, gear, agenda.
The Great Military BioTech Complex is born to be the main Operating System of the system.
9/11 is the launch of the new control grid.
Many of the following events were just test runs.
Covid is a forced upgrade of this operating system.
Weapons trade is disguised as “defense”, bioweapons trade as “biodefense”. And the latter is booming.
Transhumanism Airlines depart from Humanism and are set to land in lifeless soulless material existence.
After 1865, American inventiveness turned away from war and toward commerce and industry. Development of the lands of the West did promote some agencies to investigate natural resources. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the National Park Service appeared during this period. While government research tended toward the applied end of the research spectrum, newly-created private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute of Washington, supported much of the nation's basic scientific research.- Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
This is the official history, not whistleblowing. It’s redacted by a system critter to make crimes palatable to the normies. Still a good starting point
Summary
Daniel Else explored the results of his year-long inquiry into the organizational underpinnings of that military technological revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. By mining the Library’s resources, Else traced the evolving relationship between science and the federal government leading to the creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941. A temporary wartime agency, OSRD mobilized the nation’s academic and industrial technological resources in support of the war effort, and in so doing profoundly altered the linkages between science and engineering, industry, and government. Else explored those wartime changes and outline their impact, still seen and felt today more than seven decades after V-J Day.
Event Date September 21, 2017
Notes- Daniel Else was a specialist in national defense in the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress and the 2016 Kluge Staff Fellow at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.
Finally in 1950, the Air Force created a larger organization, the Air Research and Development Command. The House finally passed the Senate bill that had been passed the year before, and the president signed the bill, establishing the National Science Foundation. So in that five-year gap, what we saw was the creation of a number of military, Department of Defense organizations for science and scientific research, and the final NSF bill contained no mandate for military research for the National Science Foundation.
So, what are its legacy organizations? A number of federal agencies can trace their origins back to the OSRD. National Science Foundation, of course, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Development and Engineering, or, and Evaluation Command, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DARPA, of course, and in the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is the custodian of atomic stockpile. - Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
Some of Vannevar Bush’s greatest official honors
One of Vannevar Bush’s PhD students at MIT was Frederick Terman, who was later instrumental in the development of “Silicon Valley”.
DR. HEIKO SCHÖNING: THE STAGE FOR THE DARK WINTER HAS BEEN SET WITH THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS FROM 2001. There was even an Event201 for the Anthrax attacks. It was called “The Dark Winter”
The Dark Winter exercise was the collaborative effort of 4 organizations. John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) initiated and conceived of an exercise wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis. Tara O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services, Inc., (ANSER) were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of Dark Winter. Sue Reingold of CSIS managed administrative and logistical arrangements. General Dennis Reimer of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) provided funding for Dark Winter.
Preparing homeland security professionals through scenario-based simulations and exercises on key issues.
Steadfast Resolve
The Steadfast Resolve exercise was planned to address the concern that poorly designed government response to the next terrorist attack could disrupt America’s economy and society as much or more than the attack itself. This concern is particularly relevant in the context of an attack that may be harmful, but not catastrophic.
In the event of a next attack, government officials will be under enormous pressure to respond swiftly, more than likely with limited information about the status of the attack or what to expect next. In today’s news cycle, the public – and the situation – will demand a swift and decisive response perhaps before exactly what is happening becomes clear. Confusion, indecision, or false starts at government’s highest levels will be magnified and may have long-lasting ramifications. Getting it wrong will be easier than getting it right. As the Hurricane Katrina experience has demonstrated, a lack of situational awareness, understanding of current plans, and an absence of effective decisionmaking tools can lead to disaster.
Dark Winter: Bioterrorism Simulation Exercise
In the summer of 2001, a group of senior-level officials, including Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, David Gergen, and James Woolsey, participated in an executive level simulation. Dark Winter simulated a U.S. National Security Council meeting at which senior officials were confronted with a smallpox attack on the United States. The exercise illustrated the issues to be addressed in the event of a bioterrorism crisis, including the challenges facing state and local governments, the role and responsiveness of the federal government, and the likely friction spots between federal- and state-level responders and responses.
Coming as it did before the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks, Dark Winter generated an enormous amount of interest in both the public policy community and the media. CSIS briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, then FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, over 80 members of Congress, senior government officials and leaders, including approximately 20 ambassadors to the United States, and senior government officials from Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Besides raising public awareness of the bioterrorism threat, these briefings contributed to the Bush administration’s decision to manufacture 300 million doses of the smallpox vaccine.
Silent Vector: A Critical Energy Infrastructure Simulation Exercise
The events of September 11 and additional intelligence on al Qaeda demonstrate the potential for an attack against the infrastructure of the United States. To face this challenge, CSIS developed an executive-level simulation focusing on U.S. critical energy infrastructure. The exercise took place in October 2002 and employed a simulated National Security Council of senior policymakers with former senator Sam Nunn, now chairman of CSIS’s Board of Trustees, serving as scenario president.
Silent Vector was designed to simulate possible U.S. reaction to a credible threat of terrorist attack when there is not sufficient information for effective protection. The overall purpose of the exercise was to assist the administration and Congress in their attempts to improve the effectiveness of response during the pre-attack phase of a major terrorist incident. Silent Vector challenged current and former senior government leaders to respond to increasingly credible and specific intelligence indicating the possibility of a large-scale attack against critical energy and energy-related infrastructure on the East Coast of the United States.
Black Dawn: A Scenario-Based Exercise on Catastrophic Terrorism
Organized under the auspices of the Strengthening the Global Partnership project by CSIS and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Black Dawn gathered approximately 55 current and former senior officials and experts from the European Council, the European Commission, NATO, 15 member states, and various international organizations to grapple with the challenges associated with preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by terrorists.
The exercise aimed to develop a set of actionable recommendations for the EU, NATO and individual European governments to prevent terrorists from acquiring and using WMD. The exercise was designed to energize discussion and debate as various European countries and institutions entered into their policy and budget deliberations. The central question animating the exercise was this: In hindsight, what could we have done to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD and conducting such an attack? And what more can and should we do now?
The exercise concluded with several lessons learned: the threat of WMD terrorism is real; it could happen in Europe; prevention is the best option; we can take concrete steps to significantly reduce the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; Europe has a leadership role to play; and we need to act now.
Simon Chair BlogCommentaries on U.S. relations with countries in the Western Hemisphere – focusing on international political economy, trade, investment, energy, and other current events.
A “Dark Winter” for Public Health: Meet Homeland Security’s New Bioterror Czarina
by Tom Burghardt / August 24th, 2009
In the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, successive U.S. administrations have pumped some $57 billion across 11 federal agencies and departments into what is euphemistically called “biodefense.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader William Frist, a Bushist acolyte, baldly stated that “The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological” and predicted that “an inevitable bioterror attack” would come “at some time in the next 10 years.”
Later that year, Frist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) covertly inserted language into the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863) that granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, even in cases of willful misconduct. It was signed into law by President Bush.
According to Public Citizen and The New York Times, Frist and Hastert benefited financially from their actions; the pair, as well as 41 other congressmen and senators owned as much as $16 million in pharmaceutical stock. revealed that “the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is purported to be the key author of the language additions. This trade association represents virtually all major vaccine manufacturers.”
The Senate Majority Leader’s alarmist jeremiad at Davos was seconded by Dr. Tara O’Toole who added, “This [bioterrorism] is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today.”
Really? Not grinding poverty, global warming or the lack of access by hundreds of millions of impoverished workers and farmers to clean water, an adequate diet, health care or relief from epidemic levels of preventable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or diarrhea, but “bioterrorism” as narrowly defined by securocrats and their academic accomplices.
But Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and an outspoken critic of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex challenged O’Toole’s hysterical paradigm.
Sidel made the point that there is a fundamental conflict between the state’s national security goals and health care providers’ professional responsibilities to patients. He wrote in 2003 that “military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and personnel have long histories of secrecy and deception that are contrary to the fundamental health principles of transparency and truthfulness. They may therefore be unsuitable partners for public health agencies that need to justify receiving the public’s trust.”
In this context, the choice of O’Toole as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Undersecretary of Science and Technology is troubling to say the least. As former CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, critics charge that O’Toole’s appointment will be nothing short of a disaster.
No ordinary policy wonk with an impressive résumé and years as a government insider, O’Toole is a key player advocating for the expansion of dual-use biological weapons programs rebranded as biodefense.
Subverting the Biological Weapons Convention
The resuscitation of American bioweapons programs are facilitated by their secretive and highly-classified nature. Under cover of academic freedom or intellectual property rights, the U.S. Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex has largely been outsourced by the state to private companies and contractors at top American corporations and universities.
Efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) by the inclusion of verification language into the treaty and regular inspection of suspect facilities by international experts have been shot-down since 2001 by the Bush and now, the Obama administrations. Why?
Primarily because the United States view onsite measures as a threat to the commercial proprietary information of multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to America’s reputedly “defensive” biological programs; initiatives that continue to work with nature’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens.
In fact, the problem of the dual-use nature of such research is a conundrum facing critics who challenge the break-neck expansion of concealed weapons programs. Simply put, military activities can be disguised as commercial research to develop medical countermeasures without anyone, least of all the American people, being any the wiser.
Highly-trained microbiologists deployed across a spectrum of low-key companies, trained for academic, public health, or commercial employment are part of the dual-use problem. Who’s to say whether scientists who genetically-manipulate pathogens or create Frankenstein-like chimera disease organisms (say, synthesized Marburg or Ebola virus as has already been done with poliovirus in a U.S. lab) are engaged in treaty-busting weapons research or the development of life-saving measures.
And what about the accidental, or more sinisterly, the deliberate release of some horrific new plague by a scientist who’s “gone rogue”? As researcher Edward Hammond pointed out:
British researchers pled guilty in 2001 to charges that they improperly handled a genetically engineered hybrid of the viruses causing hepatitis C and dengue fever. British authorities characterized the virus as “more lethal than HIV”. ‘Dengatitis’ was deliberately created by researchers who wanted to use fewer laboratory animals in a search for a vaccine for Hepatitis C. Under unsafe laboratory conditions, the researchers created and nearly accidentally released a new hybrid human disease whose effects, fortunately, remain unknown; but which may have displayed different symptoms than its parents and thus been difficult to diagnose, and have required a new, unknown treatment regime. (Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)
A new report by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has charged that despite restrictions under the BWC prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for offensive use, the rapid growth of “biodefense and research programs over the last decade” has placed “new pressure” on efforts to curb the development of banned weapons listed in the treaty.
In an interview with Global Security Newswire Gerald Epstein, a senior fellow with the hawkish Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) told the publication, “When one is doing bioresearch and biodefense, one has to be careful to not overstep the treaty itself.”
He cited the U.S biodefense effort Project Bacchus–an investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine whether it was possible to build a bioweapons production facility using readily available equipment–as an instance where questions were raised if the treaty had been violated.
The type of biodefense activity that is most likely to raise questions regarding treaty compliance is “threat assessment,” the process of determining what type of biological attacks are most likely to occur, he told Global Security Newswire. A dangerous biological agent could inadvertently be developed during such research, Epstein said. (Martin Matishak, “Biodefense Research Could Violate Weapons Convention, Report Warns,” Global Security Newswire, August 20, 2009)
But Pentagon bioweaponeers did more than build “a bioweapons productions facility using readily available equipment.” They built banned weapons. According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.
After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin revealed. Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.
The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.
What the scope of these programs are today is currently unknown. We do know however, that based on available evidence the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the oxymoronic Intelligence Community, using the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a cover, continue to investigate the feasibility of transforming nature’s most deadly pathogens into weapons.
In close coordination, the United States government and their outsourced corporate partners are spending billions of dollars on research and simulation exercises, dubbed “disaster drills” by a compliant media, to facilitate this grisly trade.
Secrecy and Deceit
That the official bioterror narrative is a preposterous fiction and swindle as even the FBI was forced to admit during its much-maligned Amerithrax investigation, is hardly worth a second glance by corporate media beholden to the pharmaceutical industry for advertising revenue; call it business as usual here in the heimat.
As we now know, the finely-milled anthrax powder which killed five people and shut down representative government didn’t come from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al Qaeda, but rather from deep within America’s own Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex, to wit, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. But such troublesome and inconvenient truths are barely worth a mention by “respectable” media, e.g. the corporate stenographers who sold two imperialist military adventures to the American people.
Indeed, a credible case can be made that without the anthrax attacks, the fear levels gripping the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist events–and the subsequent clamp-down that followed, from the USA Patriot Act to the indefinite detention and torture of “terrorism” suspects, and from warrantless wiretapping to the demonization of dissent–may very well have been impossible.
It is difficult not to conclude that from the beginning of the affair, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax terrorist(s) to draw a straight line between 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. From there, it was but a short step to stitching-up a case for “regime change” in Iraq. The media’s role in this criminal enterprise was indispensable for what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has called“the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.” As Greenwald points out,
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax–tests conducted at Ft. Detrick–revealed that the anthrax sent to [former Senator Tom] Daschle contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since–as ABC variously claimed–bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” (Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon, August 1, 2008)
Despite ABC News’ claims that their information came from “four well-placed and separate sources,” they were fed information that was patently false; as Greenwald avers, “No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.”
And as we will shortly explore below, the dubious “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm” bioterror exercises designed by Dr. Tara O’Toole freely drew from the neocon’s sinister playbook, right down to the weaponized smallpox supplied to al Qaeda by Saddam.
Whether or not one buys the current permutation of the “lone nut” theory, this one alleges that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a vaccine specialist employed by USAMRIID, was the anthrax mailer; the fact is, when all is said and done the attacks, to use a much over-hyped phrase, were an inside job.
And like other “lone nuts” who have entered the parapolitical frame at their own peril, Ivins isn’t around to refute the charges.
The Alliance for Biosecurity: Insiders with a Mission and (Very) Deep Pockets
Before being pegged by the Obama administration to head DHS’s Science and Technology division where she will oversee the department’s billion dollar budget, with some 45 percent of it going towards chemical and bioweapons defense, O’Toole, as previously mentioned, was the CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, a satrapy which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to improving the country’s resilience to major biological threats.”
How “independent”? You make the call!
According to their web site The Alliance for Biosecurity is “a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases–particularly those diseases that present global security challenges.”
Alliance partners include the usual suspects: Bavarian Nordic; Center for Biosecurity of UPMC; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC company; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation. Rounding out this rogues gallery are associate members, the spooky Battelle Medical Research and Evaluation Facility and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.
Among the chief activities of the Alliance is lobbying Congress for increased funding for the development of new drugs deemed “countermeasures” under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, previously described by Antifascist Calling as a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam.
The Alliance avers that “the United States faces unprecedented risks to national security … by the clear and growing danger of bioterrorism or a destabilizing infectious disease pandemic,” and that “our nation’s vulnerability to biothreats is so severe” due to the fact that “most of the vaccines and medicines that will be needed to protect our citizens do not now exist.” Therefore, countermeasures needed to mitigate nebulous biothreats never spelled out once in the group’s literature “will likely require several years and several hundred million dollars each to successfully develop and produce.” (emphasis added)
An Alliance report, The State of Biosecurity in 2008 and Proposals for a Public/Private Pathway Forward, charts a course for “improving and accelerating” efforts to “develop medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).”
Under the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, Congress authorized $5.6 billion over ten years “to purchase MCMs for the SNS.” Funds were allocated for the procurement of the anthrax vaccine as well as for “therapeutic antibodies for inhalational anthrax, a botulism heptavalent antitoxin, a smallpox vaccine, and several products for radiological and nuclear threats, obligating a total of about $1.9 billion of the $5.6 billion BioShield fund.”
In 2006 as I noted previously, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA was authorized to spend some $1.07 billion over three years for MCMs, “only $201 million has been provided by Congress through FY 2008″ noted the Alliance, “approximately one-fifth of the authorized level.”
According to an “independent economic analysis” carried out by (who else!) the Alliance’s academic partner, the Center for Biosecurity, “it would require $3.4 billion in FY 2009 to support one year of advanced development.”
“Similarly” according to the organization, “the original appropriation of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield is equally insufficient to ensure that once MCMs are developed there will be funds available to procure them and maintain the stockpile.” Indeed, “this level of funding would need to be sustained for many years.” You can bet however, that Alliance lobbyists are busy as proverbial bees in pressuring Congress to fork over the dough!
The report state’s that Alliance goals necessarily entail instilling “a sense of urgency … with Congress” by hyping the “bioterror threat.” But there’s much more here than a simple cynical exercise at preparing the “public diplomacy” ground through academic and industry “message force multipliers” that will enable Congress to shower Big Pharma with a veritable tsunami of cash. A “risk-tolerant culture” should be promoted within BARDA, one that “understands the realities, risks, timelines, and costs of drug development.”
The “risks” to whom and for what purpose are not enumerated, but one can be certain that a “risk-tolerant culture” crafted by industry insiders will come at the expense of the health and safety of the American people, one that pushes potential legal liability should things head south onto the taxpaying public.
The stealth nature of Alliance recommendations are clearly spelled out when they aver that “stakeholders” should “focus more on the potential biothreats and the corresponding countermeasures, rather than the price tag” and that BARDA, ostensibly a public agency, should be packed with insiders “who have drug development and manufacturing experience.” This will lead to the development of “a culture that is focused on partnering with industry and academia.”
But the bottom line as always, is the corporatist bottom line for Alliance shareholders! How else can one interpret their statement that emerging “biothreats” are all the more dire today now that “interest of the public and private capital markets in biodefense has declined over the last 2-3 years.” What better way then, to beef-up those sagging capital markets than to install an industry-friendly individual at DHS with a documented track record of overplaying the “bioterror threat.”
Dark Winter
O’Toole was the principal designer of two “tabletop” bioterror preparedness drills, the 2001 Dark Winter exercise and the 2005 Atlantic Storm run-through; both were criticized by scientific experts as fabrications of an alleged threat of a smallpox attack mounted by al Qaeda.
Reviewing Milton Leitenberg’s 2005 report, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, published the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, protein chemist Dr. Eric Smith wrote the following:
Of note is Leitenberg’s dissection of the process of assessment as practiced through bioterrorism threat scenarios conducted by the US government and private think tanks. Exercises like Dark Winter, which modeled an “aerosolized” smallpox attack, Top Off 2 and 3, both on pneumonic plague strikes, and Atlantic Storm, an exercise that purported to show an al Qaida group manufacturing a dry powder smallpox weapon, were rigged. In the cases of Dark Winter and the Top Offs, transmission rates of disease were sexed up beyond historical averages so that “a disastrous outcome was assured” no matter any steps taken to contain outbreaks. Eight pages are reserved to pointedly condemn the Atlantic Storm exercise on a host of sins which can generally be described as a bundle of frank lies and misinformation coupled with a claimed terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess. And once again, juiced transmission rates of disease were employed to grease theoretical calamity. The reader comes to recognize the deus ex machina–a concoction or intervention added to dictate an outcome, in these cases very bad ones–as a regular feature of the exercises. However, the results of the same assessments–the alleged lessons learned–have never been reported with much, if any, skepticism in the media. (Eric Smith, “A Vaccine for the Hype: Milton Leitenberg’s new ‘Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Global Security, National Security Notes, March 31, 2006)
In criticizing “the fancy that such attacks are easy and one of the most catastrophic threats faced by the American people,” Smith denounces the alarmist scenarios of Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm’s designers–people like Dr. Tara O’Toole and the coterie of industry insiders and other well-paid “experts”–as guilty of perpetrating a massive “fraud … and a substantial one” on the American people.
While one of Atlantic Storm’s architects proclaimed “this is not science fiction” and that “the age of Bioterror is now…” Leitenberg and Smith denounce O’Toole’s spurious claims as “not the least bit plausible.”
Leitenberg wrote that “well before October-November 2001, the spectre of ‘bioterrorism’ benefitted from an extremely successful sales campaign.” Indeed, hyped-up scenarios such as Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm that place “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of shadowy, intelligence-linked terror outfits like al Qaeda provided “inflated predictions that … were certainly not realistic. Much worse, in addition to being wrong, inflated predictions were counterproductive. They induced interest in BW in the wrong audiences.”
But the implausible nature of the scenarios deployed in national exercises hardly prohibited the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex from concocting scarecrow-like straw men designed to sow terror amongst the American people while extracting regular infusions of cash from Congress.
Among the eight exercises analyzed by Leitenberg between 1998-2005, he found that each and every one were fraudulently designed and the threat of bioterrorism had been framed as a rationalization for “political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs,” that could “not occur without it.” This is “not benign,” Leitenberg concludes.
A second consequence of sexed-up “bioterror” drills have even more ominous implications for the immediate future. Because of national security state perceptions that mitigation of catastrophic bioterrorism is of supreme importance for national survival–perceptions reinforced by academic, corporate and militarist peddlers of crisis–”the US biodefense research program appears to be drifting into violation” of the Biological Weapons Convention. This is a menacing development and has happened, I would argue precisely because the evaluation process which justifies research into biological weapons threat capabilities and scenarios, are repackaged to conceal the offensive thrust of this research as wholly defensive in nature, which it certainly is not.
How else would one explain ongoing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to study botulism toxin, “with the added qualification” Smith points out, that because the protein toxin is “unstable, therefore there will be collaboration with other researchers to stabilize it.” The NIH grant “means preparing a much more effective botulinum toxin than had been available before.”
Smith goes on to cite “another problematical breakout” offered by two scientists to study the “aerobiological” characteristics of the lethal Marburg and Ebola viruses. How this is “defensive” in nature, in keeping with research restrictions under the Biological Weapons Convention, is another instance of a backdoor move to kick-start illicit bioweapons development.
According to Smith, the study “looks to define how the organisms can be aerosolized, an instance of research into examining vulnerability in the complete absence of a verified threat.” But I would argue that showering taxpayers dollars into such dark and troubling research tributaries deploy hyped-up threats as cover for the development of illegal weapons.
When her nomination was announced in May, Rutgers University and homeland security critic Richard Ebright told Wired,
“This is a disastrous nomination. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”
“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security,” he adds. “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” (Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Geek Chief is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” Wired, May 6, 2009)
And Dr. Smith told Wired that exercises designed by O’Toole and her colleagues show her to be “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived.”
As noted above, “[She’s] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying,” Smith told Wired.
But Smith goes even further and denounces O’Toole as an industry shill who “has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been… in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how.” It’s a “superb appointment if you’re in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth.”
“Alternatively” Smith avers, O’Toole’s appointment is “a disaster if threat assessment and prevention” has “some basis in reality.”
Not that any of this matters in Washington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by “independent Democrat” and arch neocon Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted to send her nomination to the full Senate July 29.
Never mind that the deadly weaponized pathogen employed in the attacks didn’t originate in some desolate Afghan cave or secret underground bunker controlled by Saddam.
And never mind that the principal cheerleaders for expanding state-funded programs are Pentagon bioweaponeers, private corporations and a shadowy nexus of biosecurity apparatchiks who stand to make a bundle under current and future federal initiatives.
Leading the charge for increased funding is the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative venture between the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Big Pharma.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning
Bioweapon manufacturing and trading is ‘biodefense’. Guess who does the bioterrorism that sells the ‘biodefense’. Deleted article ARCHIVED HERE
Soviet scientists reportedly used newly developed genetic engineering techniques to create vaccine-subverting and antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, and smallpox for attacks against military forces and civilian populations (Bozheyeva et al. 1999, Alibek and Handelman 2000)
TRUMP: WE’RE MOBILIZING THE MILITARY TO DELIVER THE CORONAVIRUS VACCINE END OF 2020Dr Sharad S. Chauhan is a decorated Indian Police Service (IPS) officer awarded the Prime Minister’s baton and the Home Minister’s Revolver. He is also a Gold Medallist MBBS Doctor from Delhi University with a PhD in Bioterrorism. He also authored the book Biological Weapons. SOURCE
The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Alexeter Technologies LLC, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., Altimmune Inc., ANP Technologies Inc., Bavarian Nordic AS, Cleveland BioLabs Inc., Elusys Therapeutics Inc., Emergent BioSolutions Inc., General Dynamics Corp., and GlaxoSmithKline Plc are some of the major market participants. Although the rising prevalence of infectious disease and rapid increase in government funding in R&D will offer immense growth opportunities, to leverage the current opportunities, market vendors must strengthen their foothold in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Boyle touches upon GreatGameIndia‘s exclusive report Coronavirus Bioweapon – where we reported in detail how Chinese Biowarfare agents working at the Canadian lab in Winnipeg were involved in the smuggling of Coronavirus to Wuhan’s lab from where it is believed to have been leaked.
In this bombshell interview (full transcript below), Boyle talks about:
How the Deep State deployed anthrax on US soil to whip up publicity about biological weapons and increase funding for bioweapons labs
Why the WHO and CDC are both criminal organizations which are complicit in the covert development of biological weapons
The “death science” industry and why the US government has spent over $100 billion developing self-replicating weapons
Details about the Pirbright Institute and its ties to bioweapons, depopulation, vaccines and coronavirus patents. (It’s partially funded by Bill & Melinda Gates)
Why all BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the world should be banned and shut down.
Full transcript
Geopolitics and Empire: Geopolitics & Empire is joined by Dr. Francis Boyle, who is international law professor at the University of Illinois. We’ll be discussing the Wuhan coronavirus and biological warfare. He’s served as counsel to numerous governments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Palestinian authority. He’s represented numerous national international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and biowarfare. He’s written numerous books, one of my favorites being “Destroying Libya and World Order”, which I assigned as mandatory reading material for my own students when I taught at the Monterrey Institute of Technology.
But most important for this interview, he’s written a book called “Biowarfare and Terrorism”, and drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the biological weapons convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both houses of the US Congress and signed into law by President Bush. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Wow. Thank you so much for having me on and thanks for that kind introduction.
Geopolitics and Empire: Now let’s get to what’s been on the news recently. This coronavirus in Wuhan. There have been some reports recently, there’s a really interesting website called GreatGameIndia that has been reporting on this. They’ve been talking about China, which they say has been complying with biological weapons convention in recent years.
But then there are some people in the US and experts that have been saying that in reality, China isn’t complying with the weapons convention. And I think neither, perhaps the US as well. I’m wondering if China is developing its own biosafety level four lab in Wuhan and elsewhere, as you know, as a type of deterrence. Is it a type of a biological arms race that we have going on?
You told me in an email that you suspect China was developing the coronavirus as a dual use of biowarfare weapons agent. Also, what do you make of reports that Chinese scientists have been stealing research and viruses, including the coronavirus from a Canadian bio lab this past December?
And as well, Chinese nationals have been charged with smuggling vials of biological research to China from the US with the aid of Charles Lieber who was the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department. And he also happens to be in 2011 a strategic scientist at Wuhan University. So, can you tell us what’s going on with this recent outbreak in Wuhan?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, that’s a lot of questions. I guess we can take them one at a time, but if you just do a very simple Google search on “Does China have a BSL-4 laboratory?”, Wuhan comes up right away. It’s at the top of the list. That’s all with the moment this type of thing happened I began to do that. So a BSL-4 is the most serious type. And basically BSL-4 labs, we have many of them here in the United States, are used to develop offensive biological warfare weapons with DNA genetic engineering.
So it does seem to me that the Wuhan BSL-4 is the source of the coronavirus. My guess is that they were researching SARS, and they weaponize it further by giving it a gain of function properties, which means it could be more lethal.
Indeed, the latest report now is it’s a 15% fatality rate, which is more than SARS at 83% infection rate. A typical gain of function travels in the air so it could reach out maybe six feet or more from someone emitting a sneeze or a cough. Likewise, this is a specially designated WHO research lab. The WHO was in on it and they knew full well what was going on there.
Yes. It’s also been reported that Chinese scientists stole coronavirus materials from the Canadian lab at Winnipeg. Winnipeg is Canada’s formal center for research, developing, testing, biological warfare weapons. It’s along the lines of Fort Detrick here in the United States of America. I have three degrees from Harvard. It would not surprise me if something was being stolen out of Harvard to turn over to China. I read that report. I don’t know what was in those vials one way or the other.
But the bottom line is I drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention that was approved unanimously by both Houses in the United States Congress signed into law by President Bush Sr. that it appears the coronavirus that we’re dealing with here is an offensive biological warfare weapon that leaped out of Wuhan BSL-4. I’m not saying it was done deliberately. But there had been previous reports of problems with that lab and things leaking out of it. I’m afraid that is what we are dealing with today.
Geopolitics and Empire: We’ll be talking about the Wuhan and the coronavirus and China, but can you give us kind of like a bigger context. I know you’ve, previously, in interviews said that since 9/11, you think that the US has spent $100 billion on biological warfare research. We know the Soviet Union, if I’m not mistaken, developed anthrax as a bioweapon. And you’ve also mentioned that UK, France, Israel and China are all involved in biological warfare weapons research.
And something interesting, I believe one or two years ago a Bulgarian journalist and the Russian government shared their concern of the discovery of a US bioweapons lab in the country of Georgia. You’ve commented how in Africa, US has set up bioweapons labs to work on Ebola, which I think is illegal under international law. But they were allowed somehow to put those in Africa. Can you give us like a bigger picture? What’s going on with these different countries and what’s the purpose of this research?
Dr. Francis Boyle:All these BSL-4 labs are by United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There’s really no legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs. That figure I gave $100 billion, that was about 2015 I believe. I had crunched the numbers and came up with that figure the United States since 9/11.
To give you an idea that’s as much in constant dollars as the US spent to develop the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb. So it’s clearly all weapons related. We have well over 13,000 alleged life science scientists involved in research developed testing biological weapons here in the United States. Actually this goes back it even precedes 9/11 2001.
I have another book, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, tracing that all the way back to the Reagan administration under the influence of the neocons and they got very heavily involved in research development testing of biological weapons with DNA genetic engineers. It was because of that I issued my plea in 1985 in a Congressional briefing sponsored by the Council for Responsible Genetics, I’m a lawyer for them. They’re headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. All the MIT, Harvard people are involved in that, the principal ones. And then they asked me to draft the implementing legislation.
The implementing legislation that I drafted was originally designed to stop this type of work. “Death science work”, I call it, “by the United States government”. After 9/11, 2001, it just completely accelerated. My current figure, that last figure a 100 billion. I haven’t had a chance to re-crunch the numbers because I just started classes. But you have to add in about another 5 billion per year.
Basically, this is offensive biological weapons raised by the United States government and with its assistance in Canada and Britain. And so other States, the world have responded accordingly including Russia and China. They were going to set up a whole series of BSL-4 facilities as well. And you know Wuhan was the first. It backfired on them.
Geopolitics and Empire: Would you basically consider what happened and Wuhan and just boil it down to ineptitude or incompetence on the Chinese part?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, it’s criminality. It does appear they stole something there from Winnipeg. This activity that they engaged in clearly violates the Biological Weapons Convention. Research development of biological weapons these days is an international crime, the use of it would be. That was criminal.
I’m not saying they deliberately inflicted this on their own people, but it leaked out of there and all these BSL-4 facilities leak. Everyone knows that who studies this. So this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Unfortunately, it happened. The Chinese government under Xi and his comrades there have been covering this up from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1, so they’d been sitting on this until they couldn’t anymore. And everything they’re telling you is a lie. It’s propaganda.
The WHO still refuses to declare a global health emergency. It said Tedros was over there shaking hands with Xi and smiling and yanking it up. The WHO was in on it. They’ve approved many of these BSL-4 labs., they know exactly what’s going on and that is a WHO research-approved laboratory. They know what’s going on too. You can’t really believe anything the WHO is telling you about this, either they’re up to their eyeballs in it, in my opinion.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’d probably agree with you that this outbreak in Wuhan was an accidental leak from the laboratory. But just your thoughts, it’s happening at quite an opportune time because namely we’re smack in the middle of a US-China new Cold War, which is currently characterized by economic warfare such as the trade war among other forms of hybrid and technological warfare. And it seems the Wuhan outbreak will likely hit the Chinese economy hard. The Chinese are flat out dismissing any idea that the US is involved in. Like I said, it’s probably they made the mistakes in the Wuhan lab. What are your thoughts of any seemingly, this would benefit the US…
Dr. Francis Boyle: When the outbreak occurred, of course I considered that alternative too. When you have an outbreak, you’re never quite sure who or what is behind it. It certainly isn’t bats, that’s ridiculous. They made the same argument on Ebola in West Africa. I demolished that online. You can check it out. So I kept competing theories about this.
But right now, when you originally contacted me, I said I wasn’t prepared to comment because I was weighing the evidence. I’m a law professor and a lawyer, I try to do the best I can to weigh the evidence. But right now, the Wuhan BSL-4 in my opinion is the most likely source, apply Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation. I’m not ruling out some type of sabotage. But right now, I believe that is the source here.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you mentioned WHO. I’d like to just get your thoughts on the WHO and the Big Pharma. There’s also some analysts who are downplaying this news media hype of the coronavirus. You’ve just said that it seems to be lethal, but if we go back a decade to the 2009 swine flu, which I believe didn’t have too many casualties, but I think profited greatly the pharmaceutical companies. If I recall that back in 2009, many countries purchased great stocks of the vaccines and they ended up not using anywhere from 50 to 80% of the vaccines that they purchased.
You’ve previously stated in an interview that the World Health Organization is a front for Big Pharma if I’m not mistaken. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also agrees and he says, you know, 50% of WHO funding comes from pharmaceutical companies. And that the CDC itself is also severely compromised. What are your thoughts on the WHO? The CDC?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Can’t trust anything the WHO says because they’re all bought and paid for by Big Pharma and when they work in cahoots with the CDC, which is the United States government, they work in cahoots with Fort Detrick, so you can’t trust any of it.
However, the swine flu and yes, I agree pharma made a lot of money, but that swine flu which I looked at it, it did seem to me to be a genetically modified biological warfare weapon. It was a chimera of three different types of genetic strains that someone put it together in a cocktail. Fortunately, it was not as lethal as all of us fear. So fine. But as I said, this figure I just gave to you was Saturday from Lancet, which is a medical publication, saying it’s a 15% fatality rate and an 83% infection rate. So it’s quite serious, I think, far more serious than the swine flu.
As for big pharma, sure they’re all trying to profit off this today as we speak. There was a big article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, all big pharma trying to peddle whatever they can over there in China even if it’s worthless and won’t help. We do know, if you read the mainstream news media they say there isn’t a vaccine.
Well, there is, it’s by the Pirbright Institute in Britain that’s tied into their biological warfare program over there. They were behind the hoof and mouth disease outbreak over there that wiped out their cattle herd and it leaked out of there. So it’s clear they’re working on a hoof and mouth biological warfare weapon, but the vaccine is there. I have the patent for it here, I haven’t had a chance to read the patent it’s about 25 pages long and my classes just resume. So eventually, I get some free time and I’ll read the patent.
You can’t patent a vaccine with the United States patent office unless the science is there. So there is a vaccine. Everyone’s lying about that, no one’s pointing this out – there’s a vaccine but instead big pharma wants to make money and the researchers say, well, it’ll take three months and we’re racing forward, you know. Everyone’s gonna make a buck off of this, that’s for sure. But there is a vaccine, I have the patent here. It’s been patented by the United States government.
So obviously, I don’t know exactly how workable it is, but it’s a vaccine. I don’t know why it isn’t out there now? Why isn’t someone saying there is a vaccine? Perhaps political leaders have already been vaccinated for all I know, I really don’t know. But there is a vaccine, Pirbright is well known there in Britain and it’s tied into Fort Detrick and CDC is tied into Fort Detrick too. So they all know there’s a patented vaccine.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just to get your comment on, I mean, something to related to this, which was my next question. So I think, I’m not sure if it’s that same Institute that you just mentioned that has the patent. I read somewhere that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation maybe funds or has some connection to that Institute that has the patent.
Dr. Francis Boyle: I think they do. The Bill & Melinda Gates information, they fund this type of DNA genetically engineered biological warfare work. That’s correct. So you can’t trust anything they’re telling you that somehow they’re out there trying to make the world a better place. I mean, we have Bill Gates publicly admitting that the world be a better place if there were a lot less people. So the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing and they are funding this type of stuff. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just your comment, there was also the report that I guess it was a consortium of companies which included the Gates foundation that back in just two or three months ago in October of 2019 they held a pandemic exercise simulating an outbreak. I mean, what are the chances specifically of a coronavirus and it was called events 201. People can find this online online and they gave a list of seven recommendations for governments and international organizations to take. I also find that kind of interesting how they had this simulation.
Dr. Francis Boyle: That’s correct. It raises that question, the origins of what happened here. But right now, I’m just looking at the evidence I have and applying Occam’s razor and we know that Wuhan BSL-4 was research developing, testing, SARS as a biological warfare agent. So it could have been, they gave it this DNA genetic engineering enhanced properties gain of function which we do here in the West, in the United States all the time. We have all sorts of research that is clearly a bio warfare research that has been approved by the National Institutes of Health, it’s a joke. They know full well they are proving all kinds of biological warfare research and it gets funded by the United States government.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you’ve also mentioned in the email to me that what happened in the biosafety lab level 4 in Wuhan calls into question the safety of all of these level 3and 4four labs around the world.
Dr. Francis Boyle:They’re complete unsafe. BSL-3 and BSL-4 lab are only designed for research development testing of offense of biological warfare agents. In my opinion, they serve no legitimate purpose at all. They should all be shut down, every one of them. Even assuming, they’re simply too dangerous. If you want, there’s an excellent documentary called Anthrax Wars by Nadler and Coen and I’m in there. Repeatedly at the end, I say with respect to these labs, three and four, this is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Well, I’m afraid the catastrophe is now happened. So there it is.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I was just watching that documentary before we connected and I recommend the listeners go check that out. Do you see, in the future, any countries, if we come to a conflict between US, EU, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, I mean you name it. Do you see any of these countries actually utilizing these biological weapons? I mean, it’s illegal under international law but we know like in the past that international law isn’t followed. Do you think that there’s a real danger of this escalating?
Dr. Francis Boyle: For sure. That’s the only reason they develop these biological weapons to eventually be used, sure. I mean, it’s like the Manhattan project, we put all that money into developing an atom bomb and even though it was not needed to end world war II they still knew Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, yes, I think that’s correct. And also these can be used covertly. Anytime you see an unexplained sudden outbreak of a disease like this anywhere in the world, both for human beings and or animals, I always suspect the bio warfare agent is at work. I monitor the situation like I did at Wuhan until I can reach a conclusion. Yes, they can be used as the eyes for the United States government, today they are fully prepared, armed, equipped, supplied to wage a biological warfare with anthrax.
These other more exotic things I don’t know, but they have the weapons, there are stockpiles. We have to understand if you read Seymour Martin Hersh’s book published about 1968, he won the Pulitzer prize, he had the whole offensive US biological warfare industry in there back before it was illegal and criminal. Basically after 9/11, 2001, that entire industry – offensive biological warfare industry has been reconstituted here in the United States with all these BSL-4 BSL-3 labs, well over 13,000, alleged scientists sort of like Dr. Mengele working on these things. Other countries have responded in kind like Russia, like China, France is involved, Britain’s involved. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: I just wanted to get your thoughts on, in the last few years there was the Russian double agent spy Sergei Skripal who had been allegedly poisoned with Novichok out in Britain and I thought it was funny. It just so happened where he was allegedly poisoned, he was right in Porton down the British bio weapons lab, I guess the world’s first bio weapons lab that was created in 1916. I mean, I don’t know if you have thoughts on that whole incident.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Yeah, I was right down the street from Porton Down, so applying Occam’s razor who you think might’ve been behind this and it was not a nerve agent. A nerve agent would have killed him immediately. This is Novichok. It was something else like DX or something like that. So fine. But, I would just say that I don’t think that was a coincidence, but, you know, there you go. There’s the, obviously there’s a lot of speculation on that.
Geopolitics and Empire: Something else that’s kind of interesting. You’ve written in bio warfare and terrorism in your book and there’s also Graeme Macqueen, I think your colleague who wrote the anthrax deception the case for domestic conspiracy…
Dr. Francis Boyle: Everything you said in there. That’s correct.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m wondering also if this new war for biotechnological dominance, whatever you want to call it, if it can also be used kind of as a pretext for the centralization of political power and the initiation of wars like I guess it did in the 2003 Iraq war. I mean, is this another danger that we get these events like now this coronavirus and then governments will call for a centralization of greater power and taking away some of our civil liberties?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Sure. If you look at the October, 2001 anthrax attacks here in the United States, that was clearly by elements of the United States government that was behind that. That was a super weapons grade anthrax with a trillion spores per gram and it floated in the air solely a very sophisticated biological weapons lab like Fort Detrick could produce that. And they use that anthrax attack including on Congress to brand through the USA Patriot act which basically turned the United States to a police state which is what we have now. You have to understand the Pentagon, Fort Dietrich made the dugway proving ground still has a stockpile of that super weapons grade anthrax that we saw in October of 2001 that they can use the next time they want to do something like that to further develop the American police thing. Right.
Geopolitics and Empire: Is there anything else you feel important to mention regarding this Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak or biological warfare or any other thoughts you’d like to leave us with?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, you just can’t believe anything the Chinese government, the WHO, the CDC are telling. They’re all lies because they know what’s going on here and so you’re going to have to figure it out as fast as you can. But in my opinion, as of this time and I’m fully prepared to consider further evidence on this, it does seem to me that this was a DNA genetically engineered biological warfare agent leaking out of Wuhan that has gain-of-function properties which can make it more lethal. I think they are probably doing something with SARS to make it a lot more lethal and more infectious. And so for that reason, you have to take extreme precautions and they’re now finally admitted anyone within six feet can be infected, whereas with SARS that was about two feet. Well, that’s gaining a function right there and that should be a tip off.
So, I guess you’re gonna have to protect yourself. Laurie Garrett had a pretty good essay in a foreign policy yesterday and she was over there covering the SARS and she has very good advice in there except that she took the SARS figure out two to three feet and said well, you gotta stay to two to three. I think you’ve got to stay at least six feet away because this is gained function. It can flow through the air and infect and it can get you in the eyes. Any orifice, the mouth, maybe the ears, we’re not sure at this point.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m here on the border of China in Kazakhstan and I was just reading yesterday – today that they’re no longer allowing Chinese citizens into Kazakhstan without a medical paper, a medical check to get their visas to enter Kazakhstan
Dr. Francis Boyle: Those medical checks are worthless because this is just public relations by all the governments involved because there is a 14 day incubation period where people can still be infected. So someone could walk right through a medical inspection and passing a gate into your country and then they come down with the coronavirus. So that’s all public relations in my opinion by governments and they know it and they’re just sending people out there with temperatures and things like that. It’s not like SARS, this is more dangerous than SARS. As I said, I think that Wuhan lab, we know they had SARS in there that they were dealing with and I think they enhanced it at and I’m afraid that’s what we’re dealing with. But you know, I’m keeping an open mind as to what other sources that might have and I wasn’t prepared to say anything until that Wuhan lab is right there and it’s dealing with coronavirus. So again, apply Occam’s razor. It seems to me that’s the simplest explanation here.
Geopolitics and Empire: I guess my, one of my final question would be in the months ahead, apart of what you say staying six feet away from people. I’ve read taking high doses of vitamin C and other things like this can help you. But, if they come out as the situation develops and if it gets worse and they come out with a coronavirus vaccine, should people take it or not? What are your thoughts?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, what I would say is this. Right now, if you look at the article at the Wall Street Journal, big pharma is trying to sell all sorts of – they’re taking all their drugs off the shelf and say well let’s see if it works. Which is preposterous. Okay. The scientists are saying, well, we can get you a vaccine maybe two to three months but they’re not tested. So what we do know, however, is that Pirbright vaccine has been patented. So all I can assume is that that might work. But I don’t think I’d be taking any of these other vaccines. No, you have no idea what’s in there. You’ll be the Guinea pig for big pharma and everyone figures they’re gonna make a lot of money here. So I’ll keep my eye open on this and how it develop but I wouldn’t trust anything they’re trying to sell right now. They’re just pulling these things off the shelf.
If they do come up with something in two to three months, even that’s not going to be tested in accordance with normal scientific protocol. So it’s going to be a crap shoot. If it’s going to help you, indeed it might not help you because they’ll be using for this vaccines (these DNA genetic engineered vaccines) they’ll be using live coronavirus probably and sticking it in there and giving you some live coronavirus on the theory you’ll develop an immunity. That’s the way a lot of these vaccines worked out, that’s what happened with the Ebola vaccine that created the Ebola pandemic there in West Africa. They were testing out a vaccine on poor black Africans, as usual, and this vaccine had live Ebola in it so it gave them Ebola. So again, I’d be very careful even if they do come up with these vaccines two to three months from now, very careful. Why would you want to inject the live coronavirus in you?
Geopolitics and Empire: All right. I don’t believe you have a strong online presence. How can people best follow your work? I suppose to search for interviews as well as get your books.
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, basically I’m blackballed and blacklisted off all the mainstream news media here on purpose. As far as I can figure out, the US government gave an order that I should not be interviewed by anyone, so I’m not. I guess you could just put my name in there under Google, Google alert, and some interviews might come up. What happened was, right after the anthrax attacks of 9/11 2001, I was giving a lecture out at Harvard m Alma Mater. I was running a panel on biological warfare for the council for responsible genetics and it was at Harvard Divinity School and as I was going in, there was a Fox camera crew there from Boston and I said it looks to me like this has come out of the US government lab. We know they do research and testing on anthrax. Then I said the same thing there at Harvard then I gave an interview to a radio station in Washington, D C then I gave an interview on that to the BBC. So the whole world saw it and at that point I was completely cut off and I’ve been cut off ever since. So you probably not going to hear too many interviews from me here. As for my book. Biowarfare & Terrorism, you can just get it at amazon.com. That picks up the story pretty much from 9/11 2001 and until it went to press and then there are interviews I’d given to an investigative reporter, Sherwood Ross and a big one I just sent you and you might want to put that on your web page. That was pretty comprehensive.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I read that as well and I’ll include the link in the description of this interview so people can go check that out. You’re not the only academic I know and have heard of others that similar things have happened and that’s just I guess the price we pay for telling the truth. Again, for listeners, if people wanted to have a broader context and deeper understanding of what’s happening today especially with biological warfare as well as us foreign policy and international affairs, I urge you to get Dr. Francis Boyle’s books and listen to his interviews as well as his colleagues book. Graeme Macqueen, The Anthrax Deception, The Case For Domestic Conspiracy. Thank you for being with us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, thank you and again, please understand these are my current opinions. I could change my opinion here based on more evidence. So I’m just looking at the evidence out there as I see it and you have to understand there is so much disinformation, lies and propaganda that it’s kind of very difficult to distinguish truth from fact. I’m doing the best job I can here.
VINCE JAMES DOES A GREAT JOB EXPLORING THE COMPLEX FROM THE CIA ANGLE AND ARRIVING TO THE SAME BIG PICTRE AND ALL THE GOOD CONCLUSIONS, MUST WATCH ENTIRELY!
The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.
Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last weekinstructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and somefederal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.
The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.
The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the pasttwo or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China — did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Centcom, headquartered in Tampa, has purview over military operations across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. A spokesman declined to comment.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military’s information operations “support our national security priorities” and must be conducted in compliance with relevant laws and policies. “We are committed to enforcing those safeguards,” he said.
Spokespersons for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.
According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.
One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs, according to the report. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website.
Centcom has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”
Independent of the report, The Washington Post has learned that in 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md., according to officials familiar with the matter. The pseudo profiles — active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s origination in China.
The U.S. government’suse of ersatz social mediaaccounts, though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies. The White House, agencies such as the State Department and even some officials within the Defense Department have been concerned that the policies are too broad, allowing leeway for tactics that even if used to spread truthful information, risk eroding U.S. credibility, several U.S. officials said.
“Our adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” said a second senior defense official. “There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, declined to comment.
Kahl disclosed his review at a virtual meeting convened by the National Security Council on Tuesday, saying he wants to know what types of operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and how effective they have been, several officials said.
The message was essentially, “You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things,” the first defense official said.
Pentagon policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods, but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful information for psychological operations. For instance, the military sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.
In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.
“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”
Before Miller could take action, he was tapped to head a different agency — the National Counterterrorism Center. Then the November election happened and time ran out for the Trump administration to address the matter, although Miller did spend the last few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency serving as acting defense secretary.
With the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace, Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychologic operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.
“Combatant commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”
At the same time, the official said, military leaders were not trained to oversee “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or coordinate such activities with other stakeholders elsewhere in the U.S. government.
President Biden, right, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley attend a Pentagon ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. (Leigh Vogel/Bloomberg)
Last year, with a new administration in place, Facebook’s Agranovich tried again. This time he took his complaint to President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, Anne Neuberger. Agranovich, who had worked at the NSC under Trump, told Neuberger that Facebook was taking down fake accounts because they violated the company’s terms of service, according to people familiar with the exchange.
The accounts were easily detected by Facebook, which since Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election has enhanced its ability to identify mock personas and sites. In some cases, the company had removed profiles, which appeared to be associated with the military, that promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false, said a person familiar with the matter.
Agranovich alsospoke to officials at the Pentagon. His messagewas: “We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said aU.S. official briefed on the matter.
In response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed strengthening, according to officials.
The review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious information was pushed by the military, they were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not systemic problems, officials said.
Pentagon leadership did little with the review, two officials said, before Graphika and Stanford published their report on Aug. 24, which elicited a flurry of news coverage and questions for the military.
Army psyop graduates receive pins at the end of a field exercise reading “Persuade, Change, Influence.” (Cynthia McIntyre/Fort Hunter Liggett Public Affairs)
The State Department and CIA have been perturbed by the military’s use of clandestine tactics. Officers at State have admonished the Defense Department, “Hey don’t amplify our policies using fake personas, because we don’t want to be seen as creating false grass roots efforts,” the first defense official said.
One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”
Psychological operations to promote U.S. narratives overseas is nothing new in the military, but the popularity of western social media across the globehas led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images — sometimes called “deep fakes.” The logic is that views expressed by what appears to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the U.S. government.
The majority of the military’s influence operations are overt, promoting U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere under its own name, officials said. And there are valid reasons to use clandestine tactics, such as trying to infiltrate a closed terrorist chat group, they said.
A key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.
The report by Graphika and Stanford suggests that the clandestine activity did not have much impact. It noted that the “vast majority of posts and tweets” reviewed received “no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” and only 19 percent of the concocted accounts had more than 1,000 followers. “Tellingly,” the report stated, “the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.”
Clandestine influence operations have a role in support of military operations, but it should be a narrow one with “intrusive oversight” by military and civilian leadership, said Michael Lumpkin, a former senior Pentagon official handling information operations policy and a former head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “Otherwise, we risk making more enemies than friends.”
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
I’ve just brought to light insider information that confirms a very similar model has been pursued in USSR / Russia. I wonder if the two are eventually merging at the top, like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, seeing that Putin is a former Klaus Schwab disciple and a Davos regular.
I asked the AI Chat Bot “What was the role of the DoD in covid-countermeasures?” Here is what it wrote:
“The Department of Defense (DoD) played a significant role in the development of countermeasures against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The DoD worked closely with other federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to respond to the pandemic.
One of the main roles of the DoD in the COVID-19 response was to provide logistical support and medical resources to help healthcare workers and first responders on the front lines of the pandemic. The DoD also worked to develop and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies to support the response efforts.
In addition, the DoD provided funding and resources to support the development of vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research arm of the DoD, played a key role in this effort by funding and supporting the development of treatments and vaccines through its “Rapid Response Research” program.
Overall, the DoD played a vital role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by providing logistical support, medical resources, and funding for research and development efforts to combat the disease.”
AI Chat Bot gets a “F” – for a highly controlled narrative answer, which was fed to all MSM sources, while the “alternative” media did not examine it very much, with some exceptions. It wasn’t just logistics or even just lots of funding, and certainly nobody was “combatting disease”.
The frantic analysis pieces pointing harder and harder at Pfizer are being circulated to draw public anger away from the DOD-HHS complex, and steer it to expendables, Pfizer are just one of the patsy's.https://t.co/kCz7ipO8uM
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We need to speed up our little awakening because we’re still light-years behind the reality. This dwarfs Afghanistan and Covid is but a chapter in its playbook. This connects all the trigger-words: 5G, Covid, Vaccines, Graphene, The Great Reset, Blockchain, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and beyond.
A wide variety of internet-connected “smart” devices now promise consumers and businesses improved performance, convenience, efficiency, and fun. Within this broader Internet of Things (IoT) lies a growing industry of devices that monitor the human body, collect health and other personal information, and transmit that data over the internet. We refer to these emerging technologies and the data they collect as the Internet of Bodies (IoB) (see, for example, Neal, 2014; Lee, 2018), a term first applied to law and policy in 2016 by law and engineering professor Andrea M. Matwyshyn (Atlantic Council, 2017; Matwyshyn, 2016; Matwyshyn, 2018; Matawyshyn, 2019). IoB devices come in many forms. Some are already in wide use, such as wristwatch fitness monitors or pacemakers that transmit data about a patient’s heart directly to a cardiologist. Other products that are under development or newly on the market may be less familiar, such as ingestible products that collect and send information on a person’s gut, microchip implants, brain stimulation devices, and internet-connected toilets. These devices have intimate access to the body and collect vast quantities of personal biometric data. IoB device makers promise to deliver substantial health and other benefits but also pose serious risks, including risks of hacking, privacy infringements, or malfunction. Some devices, such as a reliable artificial pancreas for diabetics, could revolutionize the treatment of disease, while others could merely inflate health-care costs with little positive effect on outcomes. Access to huge torrents of live-streaming biometric data might trigger breakthroughs in medical knowledge or behavioral understanding. It might increase health outcome disparities, where only people with financial means have access to any of these benefits. Or it might enable a surveillance state of unprecedented intrusion and consequence. There is no universally accepted definition of the IoB.1 For the purposes of this report, we refer to the IoB, or the IoB ecosystem, as IoB devices (defined next, with further explanation in the passages that follow) together with the software they contain and the data they collect.
An IoB device is defined as a device that • contains software or computing capabilities • can communicate with an internet-connected device or network and satisfies one or both of the following: • collects person-generated health or biometric data • can alter the human body’s function. The software or computing capabilities in an IoB device may be as simple as a few lines of code used to configure a radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip implant, or as complex as a computer that processes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms. A connection to the internet through cellular or Wi-Fi networks is required but need not be a direct connection. For example, a device may be connected via Bluetooth to a smartphone or USB device that communicates with an internet-connected computer. Person-generated health data (PGHD) refers to health, clinical, or wellness data collected by technologies to be recorded or analyzed by the user or another person. Biometric or behavioral data refers to measurements of unique physical or behavioral properties about a person. Finally, an alteration to the body’s function refers to an augmentation or modification of how the user’s body performs, such as a change in cognitive enhancement and memory improvement provided by a brain-computer interface, or the ability to record whatever the user sees through an intraocular lens with a camera. IoB devices generally, but not always, require a physical connection to the body (e.g., they are worn, ingested, implanted, or otherwise attached to or embedded in the body, temporarily or permanently). Many IoB devices are medical devices regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).3 Figure 1 depicts examples of technologies in the IoB ecosystem that are either already available on the U.S. market or are under development. Devices that are not connected to the internet, such as ordinary heart monitors or medical ID bracelets, are not included in the definition of IoB. Nor are implanted magnets (a niche consumer product used by those in the so-called bodyhacker community described in the next section) that are not connected to smartphone applications (apps), because although they change the body’s functionality by allowing the user to sense electromagnetic vibrations, the devices do not contain software. Trends in IoB technologies and additional examples are further discussed in the next section. Some IoB devices may fall in and out of our definition at different times. For example, a Wi-Fi-connected smartphone on its own would not be part of the IoB; however, once a health app is installed that requires connection to the body to track user information, such as heart rate or number of steps taken, the phone would be considered IoB. Our definition is meant to capture rapidly evolving technologies that have the potential to bring about the various risks and benefits that are discussed in this report. We focused on analyzing existing and emerging IoB technologies that appear to have the potential to improve health and medical outcomes, efficiency, and human function or performance, but that could also endanger users’ legal, ethical, and privacy rights or present personal or national security risks. For this research, we conducted an extensive literature review and interviewed security experts, technology developers, and IoB advocates to understand anticipated risks and benefits. We had valuable discussions with experts at BDYHAX 2019, an annual convention for bodyhackers, in February 2019, and DEFCON 27, one of the world’s largest hacker conferences, in August 2019. In this report, we discuss trends in the technology landscape and outline the benefits and risks to the user and other stakeholders. We present the current state of governance that applies to IoB devices and the data they collect and conclude by offering recommendations for improved regulation to best balance those risks and rewards.
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Operation Warp Speed logo
Transhumanism, Bodyhacking, Biohacking, and More
The IoB is related to several movements outside of formal health care focused on integrating human bodies with technology. Next, we summarize some of these concepts, though there is much overlap and interchangeability among them. Transhumanism is a worldview and political movement advocating for the transcendence of humanity beyond current human capabilities. Transhumanists want to use technology, such as artificial organs and other techniques, to halt aging and achieve “radical life extension” (Vita-Moore, 2018). Transhumanists may also seek to resist disease, enhance their intelligence, or thwart fatigue through diet, exercise, supplements, relaxation techniques, or nootropics (substances that may improve cognitive function). Bodyhackers, biohackers, and cyborgs, who enjoy experimenting with body enhancement, often refer to themselves as grinders. They may or may not identify as transhumanists. These terms are often interchanged in common usage, but some do distinguish between them (Trammell, 2015). Bodyhacking generally refers to modifying the body to enhance one’s physical or cognitive abilities. Some bodyhacking is purely aesthetic. Hackers have implanted horns in their heads and LED lights under their skin. Other hacks, such as implanting RFID microchips in one’s hand, are meant to enhance function, allowing users to unlock doors, ride public transportation, store emergency contact information, or make purchases with the sweep of an arm (Baenen, 2017; Savage, 2018). One bodyhacker removed the RFID microchip from her car’s key fob and had it implanted in her arm (Linder, 2019). A few bodyhackers have implanted a device that is a combined wireless router and hard drive that can be used as a node in a wireless mesh network (Oberhaus, 2019). Some bodyhacking is medical in nature, including 3D-printed prosthetics and do-it-yourself artificial pancreases. Still others use the term for any method of improving health, including bodybuilding, diet, or exercise. Biohacking generally denotes techniques that modify the biological systems of humans or other living organisms. This ranges from bodybuilding and nootropics to developing cures for diseases via self-experimentation to human genetic manipulation through CRISPR-Cas9 techniques (Samuel, 2019; Griffin, 2018). Cyborgs, or cybernetic organisms, are people who have used machines to enhance intelligence or the senses. Neil Harbisson, a colorblind man who can “hear” color through an antenna implanted in his head that plays a tune for different colors or wavelengths of light, is acknowledged as the first person to be legally recognized by a government as a cyborg, by being allowed to have his passport picture include his implant (Donahue, 2017). Because IoB is a wide-ranging field that intersects with do-it-yourself body modification, consumer products, and medical care, understanding its benefits and risks is critical.
The Internet of Bodies is here. This is how it could change our lives
04 Jun 2020, Xiao Liu Fellow at the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum
We’re entering the era of the “Internet of Bodies”: collecting our physical data via a range of devices that can be implanted, swallowed or worn.
The result is a huge amount of health-related data that could improve human wellbeing around the world, and prove crucial in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
But a number of risks and challenges must be addressed to realize the potential of this technology, from privacy issues to practical hurdles.
In the special wards of Shanghai’s Public Health Clinical Center, nurses use smart thermometers to check the temperatures of COVID-19 patients. Each person’s temperature is recorded with a sensor, reducing the risk of infection through contact, and the data is sent to an observation dashboard. An abnormal result triggers an alert to medical staff, who can then intervene promptly. The gathered data also allows medics to analyse trends over time.
The smart thermometers are designed by VivaLNK, a Silicon-Valley based startup, and are a powerful example of the many digital products and services that are revolutionizing healthcare. After the Internet of Things, which transformed the way we live, travel and work by connecting everyday objects to the Internet, it’s now time for the Internet of Bodies. This means collecting our physical data via devices that can be implanted, swallowed or simply worn, generating huge amounts of health-related information.
Some of these solutions, such as fitness trackers, are an extension of the Internet of Things. But because the Internet of Bodies centres on the human body and health, it also raises its own specific set of opportunities and challenges, from privacy issues to legal and ethical questions.
Image: McKinsey & Company
Connecting our bodies
As futuristic as the Internet of Bodies may seem, many people are already connected to it through wearable devices. The smartwatch segment alone has grown into a $13 billion market by 2018, and is projected to increase another 32% to $18 billion by 2021. Smart toothbrushes and even hairbrushes can also let people track patterns in their personal care and behaviour.
For health professionals, the Internet of Bodies opens the gate to a new era of effective monitoring and treatment.
In 2017, the U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved the first use of digital pills in the United States. Digital pills contain tiny, ingestible sensors, as well as medicine. Once swallowed, the sensor is activated in the patient’s stomach and transmits data to their smartphone or other devices.
In 2018, Kaiser Permanente, a healthcare provider in California, started a virtual rehab program for patients recovering from heart attacks. The patients shared their data with their care providers through a smartwatch, allowing for better monitoring and a closer, more continuous relationship between patient and doctor. Thanks to this innovation, the completion rate of the rehab program rose from less than 50% to 87%, accompanied by a fall in the readmission rate and programme cost.
The deluge of data collected through such technologies is advancing our understanding of how human behaviour, lifestyle and environmental conditions affect our health. It has also expanded the notion of healthcare beyond the hospital or surgery and into everyday life. This could prove crucial in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Keeping track of symptoms could help us stop the spread of infection, and quickly detect new cases. Researchers are investigating whether data gathered from smartwatches and similar devices can be used as viral infection alerts by tracking the user’s heart rate and breathing.
At the same time, this complex and evolving technology raises new regulatory challenges.
What counts as health information?
In most countries, strict regulations exist around personal health information such as medical records and blood or tissue samples. However, these conventional regulations often fail to cover the new kind of health data generated through the Internet of Bodies, and the entities gathering and processing this data.
In the United States, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which is the major law for health data regulation, applies only to medical providers, health insurers, and their business associations. Its definition of “personal health information” covers only the data held by these entities. This definition is turning out to be inadequate for the era of the Internet of Bodies. Tech companies are now also offering health-related products and services, and gathering data. Margaret Riley, a professor of health law at the University of Virginia, pointed out to me in an interview that HIPPA does not cover the masses of data from consumer wearables, for example.
Another problem is that the current regulations only look at whether the data is sensitive in itself, not whether it can be used to generate sensitive information. For example, the result of a blood test in a hospital will generally be classified as sensitive data, because it reveals private information about your personal health. But today, all sorts of seemingly non-sensitive data can also be used to draw inferences about your health, through data analytics. Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law school, told me in an interview that even data that is not about health at all, such as grocery shopping lists, can be used for such inferences. As a result, conventional regulations may fail to cover data that is sensitive and private, simply because it did not look sensitive before it was processed.
Data risks
Identifying and protecting sensitive data matters, because it can directly affect how we are treated by institutions and other people. With big data analytics, countless day-to-day actions and decisions can ultimately feed into our health profile, which may be created and maintained not just by traditional healthcare providers, but also by tech companies or other entities. Without appropriate laws and regulations, it could also be sold. At the same time, data from the Internet of Bodies can be used to make predictions and inferences that could affect a person’s or group’s access to resources such as healthcare, insurance and employment.
James Dempsey, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, told me in an interview that this could lead to unfair treatment. He warned of potential discrimination and bias when such data is used for decisions in insurance and employment. The affected people may not even be aware of this.
One solution would be to update the regulations. Sandra Wachter and Brent Mittelstadt, two scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute, suggest that data protection law should focus more on how and why data is processed, and not just on its raw state. They argue for a so-called “right to reasonable inferences”, meaning the right to have your data used only for reasonable, socially acceptable inferences. This would involve setting standards on whether and when inferring certain information from a person’s data, including the state of their present or future health, is socially acceptable or overly invasive.
Practical problems
Apart from the concerns over privacy and sensitivity, there are also a number of practical problems in dealing with the sheer volume of data generated by the Internet of Bodies. The lack of standards around security and data processing makes it difficult to combine data from diverse sources, and use it to advance research. Different countries and institutions are trying to jointly overcome this problem. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and its Standards Association have been working with the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health, as well as universities and businesses among other stakeholders since 2016, to address the security and interoperability issue of connected health.
As the Internet of Bodies spreads into every aspect of our existence, we are facing a range of new challenges. But we also have an unprecedented chance to improve our health and well-being, and save countless lives. During the COVID-19 crisis, using this opportunity and finding solutions to the challenges is a more urgent task than ever. This relies on government agencies and legislative bodies working with the private sector and civil society to create a robust governance framework, and to include inferences in the realm of data protection. Devising technological and regulatory standards for interoperability and security would also be crucial to unleashing the power of the newly available data. The key is to collaborate across borders and sectors to fully realize the enormous benefits of this rapidly advancing technology.
Governance of IoB devices is managed through a patchwork of state and federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and consumer advocacy groups
The primary entities responsible for governance of IoB devices are the FDA and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Although the FDA is making strides in cybersecurity of medical devices, many IoB devices, especially those available for consumer use, do not fall under FDA jurisdiction.
Federal and state officials have begun to address cybersecurity risks associated with IoB that are beyond FDA oversight, but there are few laws that mandate cybersecurity best practices.
As with IoB devices, there is no single entity that provides oversight to IoB data
Protection of medical information is regulated at the federal level, in part, by HIPAA.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) helps ensure data security and consumer privacy through legal actions brought by the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Data brokers are largely unregulated, but some legal experts are calling for policies to protect consumers.
As the United States has no federal data privacy law, states have introduced a patchwork of laws and regulations that apply to residents’ personal data, some of which includes IoB-related information.
The lack of consistency in IoB laws among states and between the state and federal level potentially enables regulatory gaps and enforcement challenges.
Recommendations
The U.S. Commerce Department can put foreign IoB companies on its “Entity List,” preventing them from doing business with Americans, if those foreign companies are implicated in human rights violations.
As 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and satellite internet standards are rolled out, the federal government should be prepared for issues by funding studies and working with experts to develop security regulations.
It will be important to consider how to incentivize quicker phase-out of the legacy medical devices with poor cybersecurity that are already in wide use.
IoB developers must be more attentive to cybersecurity by integrating cybersecurity and privacy considerations from the beginning of product development.
Device makers should test software for vulnerabilities often and devise methods for users to patch software.
Congress should consider establishing federal data transparency and protection standards for data that are collected from the IoB.
The FTC could play a larger role to ensure that marketing claims about improved well-being or specific health treatment are backed by appropriate evidence.
JAMMU and Kashmir is almost always in the news for one reason or another. Apart from the obvious political headlines, J&K was also in the news because of covid-19. As the world struggled with covid-19 pandemic, J&K faced a peculiar situation due to its poor health infrastructure. Nonetheless, all sections of society did a commendable job in keeping covid under control and preventing the loss of life as much as possible. The doctors Association in Kashmir along with the administration did as much as possible through their efforts. For that we are all thankful to them. However, it is about time that we integrate our Healthcare System by upgrading it and introducing to it new technologies from the current world.
We’ve all heard of the Internet of Things, a network of products ranging from refrigerators to cars to industrial control systems that are connected to the internet. Internet of Bodies (IoB) the outcome of the Internet of Things (IoT) is broadly helping the healthcare system and every individual to live life with ease by managing the human body in terms of technology. The Internet of Bodies connects the human body to a network of internet run devices.
The use of IoB can be independent or by the health care heroes (doctors) to monitor, report and enhance the health system of the human body. The internet of Bodies (IoB) are broadly classified into three categories or in some cases we can say three generations – Body Internal, Body External and Body embedded. The Body Internal model of IoB is the category, in which the individual or patient is interacting with the technology environment or we can say internet or our healthcare system by having an installed device inside the human body. Body External model or generation of IoB signifies the model where the device is installed external to the body for certain usage viz. Apple watches and other smart bands from various OEM’s for tracking blood pressure, heart rate etc which can later be used for proper health tracking and monitoring purposes. Last one under this classifications are Body Embedded, in which the devices are embedded under the skin by health care professionals during a number of health situations.
The Internet of Bodies is a small part or even the offspring of the Internet of Things. Much like it, there remains the challenge of data and information breach as we have already witnessed many excessive distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks and other cyber-attacks on IoTs to exploit data and gather information. The effects are even more severe and vulnerable in the case of the Internet of Bodies as the human body is involved in this schema.
The risk of these threats has taken over the discussion about the IOBs. Thus, this has become a great concern in medical technology companies. Most of the existing IoB companies just rely on end-user license agreements and privacy policies to retain rights in software and to create rights to monitor, aggregate and share users’ body data. They just need to properly enhance the security model and implement high security measures to avoid any misfortune. For the same the Government of India is already examining the personal data protection bill 2019.
The Internet has not managed to change our lifestyles in the way the internet of things will!
Views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial stance of Kashmir Observer
The author is presently Manager IT & Ops In HK Group
Social media, sensor feeds, and scientific studies generate large amounts of valuable data. However, understanding the relationships among this data can be challenging. Graph analytics has emerged as an approach by which analysts can efficiently examine the structure of the large networks produced from these data sources and draw conclusions from the observed patterns. By understanding the complex relationships both within and between data sources, a more complete picture of the analysis problem can be understood. With lessons learned from innovations in the expanding realm of deep neural networks, the Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program seeks to advance the arena of graph analytics.
The HIVE program is looking to build a graph analytics processor that can process streaming graphs 1000X faster and at much lower power than current processing technology. If successful, the program will enable graph analytics techniques powerful enough to solve tough challenges in cyber security, infrastructure monitoring and other areas of national interest. Graph analytic processing that currently requires racks of servers could become practical in tactical situations to support front-line decision making. What ’s more, these advanced graph analytics servers could have the power to analyze the billion- and trillion-edge graphs that will be generated by the Internet of Things, ever-expanding social networks, and future sensor networks.
In parallel with the hardware development of a HIVE processor, DARPA is working with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the HIVE Graph Challenge with the goal of developing a trillion-edge dataset. This freely available dataset will spur innovative software and hardware solutions in the broader graph analysis community that will contribute to the HIVE program.
The overall objective is to accelerate innovation in graph analytics to open new pathways for meeting the challenge of understanding an ever-increasing torrent of data. The HIVE program features two primary challenges:
The first is a static graph problem focused on sub-graph Isomorphism. This task is to further the ability to search a large graph in order to identify a particular subsection of that graph.
The second is a dynamic graph problem focused on trying to find optimal clusters of data within the graph.
Both challenges will include a small graph problem in the billions of nodes and a large graph problem in the trillions of nodes.
Transhuman Code authors discuss digital ID’s and a centralized AI-controlled society. In 2018 More info
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It’s as simple as 1,2,3,4: You make them audit each other.
Do something like we did:
Create an UNLISTED video on YouTube. Don’t share the link to anyone.
Make a PRIVATE blog post with the video (and not much else to attract people) on another platform, one with detailed and credible traffic reports like WordPress preferably live traffic reports similar to YouTube’s. Set it private so that no one can find the link unless you give it to them. And DON’T share the link with anyone, except… see below
Make a PUBLIC Facebook post with the PRIVATE blog link. Now the only access gate to the blog post and the video is Facebook. Boost the post immediately, even if only for 5-10 bucks, it’s enough to generate good comprehensive statistics from Facebook. Make sure there’s no other links or distractions included so the audience can’t go anywhere else or come from anyone else, that compromises the experiment
Compare the Facebook reports with the ones from the blogging platform and the one from Youtube. If they are honest, the numbers vary only about 5-10%. If you have my luck, Facebook reports 2-300% more than the blog, while YouTube has capped your numbers and deletes views same way Dominion deleted Trump votes, so it has no relation whatsoever with the other two. That’s the case for the Fauci Fashion song below, which has not been allowed to cross 9k for over half a year, despite some intense promo efforts.
5. (Optional): Feel free to add more elements to the scheme, the only rule is to be able to accurately monitor the traffic, numbers as well and sources, destinations, gates etc. This model is in 3D, but any number can go if you extrapolate the method intelligently.
Bad idea again, Susie
IMPORTANT: As time passes, if people start sharing the links organically, they can create distortions and interferences in your controlled audience funnel, first 2-3 days are the most accurate, from there things can go either way. Nevertheless, that can’t explain my numbers either, but can explain smaller deviations from the general rule.
If you think a whole industry went away with Cambridge Analytica, I lol
This post is an upgrade of an earlier post focused on Facebook only. I promised I will do my best to come up with something similar for YoutTube, came up with something even better: This one is like an integrated 3D version of that experiment, and can be expanded, no theoretical limits to it. But on the original post you can read more details evidence on the day-to-day Facebook ripoff and gaslighting of its audience, CLICK HERE TO READ.
Later update: Funniest thing: people figuring out I’m right not from monitoring their own numbers, as I advised, but from watching Biden’s. Ok, whatever you can…
SourceThis one looks exactly like my screenshots for my Fauci Fashion video above, but in reverse, I’ve watched my views counter going backwards. And I wasn’t alone. Click here to read
Biden’s message is clear: “Learn more if you want to open. Comments closed”. So I had to do this. Launching the #FuckYoutube hashtag. On Youtube, see the description of the video below. On Youtube.
Btw, same goes for Facebook. I can’t research Twitter now, but if I am to bet I don’t hesitate
The President of the US of A, Big Joe-Un, and his Big Tech lemmings, are a buncha retarded pathetic thieves and nothing can stop the awareness, especially not imbeciles like themselves Read more, it’s juicy!
This is getting so annoying…but at least they are proving me right😡🤬😁👍…80 million did note vote for Basement. Even Instagram has to force you to follow his illegitimate White House page. pic.twitter.com/SVOgwX2i92
Get involved, share this as wide as you can, make and share your own experiments, let’s crash this monster and its stock market value by outing its schemes!
Imagine getting 115k likes and no heart 😀 What numbers do you see? Check it here
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Note: https://t.co/q9lDUo7sSn is not a release, insurance dump, or response to Assange’s arrest. It is the page where published documents are available for bulk download so that people can create mirrors, access publications offline, or use the raw data. It has existed for years.
At first sight, it all seems like a bunch of old random junk, and all files are dated 01-Jan-1984 01:01, while the content seems to be mostly from 2009. There are some overlooked hidden gems, that’s a good trove of knowledge there, but seems like nothing new and I’m getting para-paranoid with a feeling someone’s wasting our energy or testing us. I’ll update this if I find anything worthy of your attention
Later update: I did actually find some useful stuff there, I’ll make a separate articles, but most of the content is a waste of time and a distraction. Keep following and supporting this website for updates!
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
Reddit me this: – If you are a musician, you’re more than welcome to post your Soundcloud and Spotify links in Reddit subs. – If you are a journalist, you’re more than welcome to post links to your published articles in Reddit subs. – If you are a photographer and you want to post a link to your photography website or portfolio, you’re a spammer, you’re scum, your post will be taken down from most Reddit subs and you’re even risking a ban.
Not as many people are as familiar with Reddit as with Facebook or other socials, so here’s a little context:
Imagine Facebook was only made of groups and group admins were the Suckerbergs of their domains. This is Reddit for you. When they’re dealing with photography or graphic design or any type of still images, almost all these admins treat creators as milk cows, using their work to drive traffic, engage audiences, grow their influence and sometimes push a product. But if photographers dare to hope for some minimal support, all they get is a spit in the face! As if we are the scum of the Earth for hoping to get some following if our work is appreciated. No one is asking for money, crowdfunding or any direct material compensation. Most of us are so starving for attention on a super-competitive stage that we’re happy to do it for a few bare page views on our websites. But nah, that’s too much to ask, all we are allowed to earn is meaningless upvotes (likes in Facebook terms) which lead nowhere. Reddit brands itself as the “Frontpage of Internet” but when it comes to photography, it’s just a sinkhole where talent gets exhausted for nothing and quickly buried. This is not going on only in Photography subs (groups, in Facebook terms), but in most of them. Some of the biggest leaches are the Travel subs, where photography can be even prevalent over other types of posts. There, this crazy unjustified double standard is even more obvious: you can post a video that directly links to your Youtube channel, you can post an article that links directly to a news organization (which is for-profit), but photographers are 2nd hand reditters, they don’t deserve same privileges, they are expected to kiss admins’ feet for being slaved and disregarded.
Linking is a matter of etiquette in most artistic communities.
How is a photography portfolio link any different from, let’s say, article links, which link to the business that created them? No one asks people to copy-paste the articles in posts, to avoid spam in favor of the publisher. What if people from music subs/groups asked musicians to upload their music directly in posts and stop linking to their Soundcloud?! I have an even better idea: forget Youtube links, let’s start producing original video content, catered especially for these special Reddit admins, and upload it there, free of charge! Yeah, sounds insane, my point exactly, I mean: where do you draw the line?? The double standard is not just obvious, it’s insane and deplorable. This abusive attitude is not even limited to Reddit, that’s just where I find it almost ubiquitous, but it’s quite prevalent on Facebook, MeWe and other socials too. I wonder who came up with the concept that photographers are lower-class artists and deserve to slave for the benefit of some social media parasites.
How is the Reddit organization regarding this behavior?
In its “guidelines for best practices” Redit states: “We’re not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit. Your stuff’s probably amazing and someone would be really interested in it but… If you submit mostly your own links and your presence on reddit is mostly for your self-promotion of your brand, page, blog, app, or business, you are more likely to be a spammer than you think! Read the FAQ and make sure that you really understand that.” Self promotion runs the world in 2019, it drives personal growth, self-sufficiency and self-sustainability. It should be encouraged, not seen as a disease. But many people prefer you dependent on them, otherwise their existence would be meaningless. No one seems to take action when they are flooded with corporate self-promo, even when it’s painted on their chest (t-shirt), because that’s called “advertising” and it’s ok. Meanwhile, the most sour, salty and unaccomplished members of society can’t wait to tax the plebs for attempting to post a mere link to their website because that’s “spam”. However, this is not my main argument here. The problem is that, even if you accept this retrograde, disconnected and mindless stance from Reddit, admins/mods still don’t seem to care about it. They definitely make no distinctions, everyone is a spammer in their eyes, you won’t see anyone excepted for good behavior from their brutal and abusive ruling. Anyone but themselves. “Reddit is different from any other place on the web – first and foremost, it’s about community, discussion, and sharing. Honor that and you’ll love it here”, they brag. In fact, everyone in social media attempts the same thing, that’s nothing original. The only thing different about Reddit is that it expects you to honor it and offers nothing in return, besides contempt and disrespect. At least for photographers and such.
A simple and practical solution in two steps:
Step 1. Be the change we all need to see on Reddit: Make a sub that accomplishes three things: – shows actual love to photographers, – allows them to truly benefit from their contributions, – actively pushes users to support what they use / love
Just limit the number of daily posts per person to avoid abuse, and limit the links to one per post, which has to lead to a portfolio or similar, not photo equipment sales or such. And I bet my ass that you will beget tons of love, the best contributions and some the best photographers. I would do it myself, but I can hardly manage my current online presence, I’m doing more things than anyone has time to hear about. So I’m hoping that someone who has the resources and the good motivation picks up on this idea and invites me to the inauguration. I will reward that sub with all the free promo I can offer! I’m an amateur photographer, it’s not my main activity, not even the second on my list of occupations. But I love the art, I put my soul on a plate when I take and publish an image, I love gifted artists, and I think just treatment should be the default in a healthy society. I know for a fact that all situations we put ourselves in should be win-win, otherwise they are lose-lose. Reddit admins think they should be win-fv#k off. No one really wins when the partner loses.
Step 2. Boycott and protest the leeches, instead of feeding them your work.
Who wants to be the positive character in this dystopia / internet drama and do it right? Now would be a great time for you to act!
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! My articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them