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Posts Tagged ‘IRON FIST’

Pro-Censorship Democrats Whitewash the Federal Government’s Iron Fist | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023

But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

Perhaps the biggest “lag time” is Americans learning how the feds are suppressing freedom of speech.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/pro-censorship-democrats-whitewash-the-federal-governments-iron-fist/

by Jim Bovard 

jpb congress twitter files composite image sharpened

The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing last Thursday on the Twitter Files. Elon Musk purchased Twitter last October and was aghast to learn how the feds had previously domineered his new company. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” he tweeted on December 10. Musk chose a handful of journalists to go through Twitter’s records and expose how the feds domineered the company.

Prior to Thursday’s hearing, the Twitter Files revealed that the U.S. State Department had directly pressured Twitter to cancel almost 300,000 accounts (including those of journalists and foreign diplomats). In June 2021, a State Department contractor sent Twitter a list of “around 40k Twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior…and Hindu nationalism more broadly.” But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics. The State Department sent Twitter a list of 5,500 names believed to be “Chinese…accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.” The list was so sloppy that it “included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad,” according to a Twitter internal analysis. One Twitter executive ridiculed the presumption that “If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked.”

The FBI perpetually browbeat Twitter to suppress accounts, including Twitter parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.” In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI agent Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.” Dehmlow had a task force of 80 agents to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Her team continually pounded Twitter headquarters with tweets and individuals they wanted suppressed.

Biden’s COVID policymakers were some of the most brazen censors of social media. The Biden White House browbeat Twitter into canceling the accounts of Alex Berenson and many other lockdown critics. A lawsuit is exposing how the Biden White House sought total suppression of any content on social media that raised doubts on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine. Twitter Files added new logs to the bonfire on the morning of the hearing with revelations of a federal contractor pressuring social media companies to suppress “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy.”

Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly targeted by a vast, federally funded Censorship-Industrial-Complex. The feds and their contractors are going on ever-more wild goose chases to suppress any views the Washington establishment disapproves.

Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were the witnesses at last week’s hearing. Though both are bestselling authors with long records of excellent reporting, they were treated as shameless grifters who basely smeared noble federal agencies.

See the rest here

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The FBI’s Long History of Treating Political Dissent as Terrorism

Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2019

“What is known is that there is a persistent pattern of monitoring civil society activity,” the report concludes, calling for strict oversight and reform of the bureau. “The FBI continuously singles out peace, racial justice, environmental, and economic justice groups for scrutiny. This is consistent with a decades-long pattern of FBI First Amendment abuses and suggests deeply seated political bias.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-dissent/

While terrorism in the U.S. is relatively rare, over the last decade most politically motivated violence has come at the hands of far-right extremists. Despite that reality, the FBI has devoted disproportionate resources to the surveillance of nonviolent civil society groups and protest movements, particularly on the left, using its mandate to protect national security to target scores of individuals posing no threat but opposing government policies and practices.

Since 2010, the FBI has surveilled black activists and Muslim Americans, Palestinian solidarity and peace activists, Abolish ICE protesters, Occupy Wall Street, environmentalists, Cuba and Iran normalization proponents, and protesters at the Republican National Convention. And that is just the surveillance we know of — as the civil liberties group Defending Rights & Dissent documents in a report published today. The report is a detailed catalog of known FBI First Amendment abuses and political surveillance since 2010, when the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General published the last official review of Bush-era abuses. The incidents the report references, many of which were previously covered by The Intercept, were largely exposed through public records requests by journalists, activists, and civil rights advocates. The FBI relentlessly fought those disclosures, and the documents we have were often so heavily redacted they only revealed the existence of initiatives like a “Race Paper” or an “Iron Fist” operation, both targeting racial justice activists, while giving away little detail about their content.

But the targeting of political dissent is nothing new for the FBI. In fact, one of the bureau’s first campaigns, which began a hundred years ago next month, was an abusive crackdown of politically active immigrants it viewed as disloyal potential terrorists.

On the second anniversary of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, law enforcement agents at the direction of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation — the FBI’s precursor — raided the Russian People’s House in New York City, where immigrants gathered to take classes, and beat and arrested everyone they found there. In the months following, local and federal police across major U.S. cities rounded up thousands of men and women, mostly foreign-born, who they accused of being subversives and Communists. The raids followed politically motivated investigations into immigrant associations, labor organizing groups, and leftist and anarchist circles.

The Palmer Raids, as they came to be known, after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, ushered in an era that tested the nation’s commitment to the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. One hundred years later, the FBI continues to target political dissent with a broad mandate, little oversight, and next to no transparency. The FBI continues to routinely conflate dissent with terrorism, and remains particularly fixated on leftist ideologies. Like the old bureau under Palmer, today’s FBI also casts its net around a wide range of civil society and social justice groups as well as racial and religious minorities.

“What is known is that there is a persistent pattern of monitoring civil society activity,” the report concludes, calling for strict oversight and reform of the bureau. “The FBI continuously singles out peace, racial justice, environmental, and economic justice groups for scrutiny. This is consistent with a decades-long pattern of FBI First Amendment abuses and suggests deeply seated political bias.”

After reviewing the report, a spokesperson for the FBI wrote in a statement to The Intercept that every activity the FBI conducts “must uphold the Constitution and be carried out in accordance with federal laws.” The spokesperson added that the bureau’s investigative activities “may not be based solely on the exercise of rights guaranteed by the First Amendment” and that its methods “are subject to multiple layers of oversight.” On its website, the bureau calls the Palmer Raids “certainly not a bright spot for the young Bureau” but adds that they did allow it to “gain valuable experience in terrorism investigations and intelligence work and learn important lessons about the need to protect civil liberties and constitutional rights.”

In fact, FBI violations of civil liberties and constitutional rights continued to be exposed at different points in the bureau’s history — most notably in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and in the post-9/11 years…

Across the country, activists have taken note. “I think a lot of us have just become used to being surveilled by the government,” said Mustafa Jumale, policy manager with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration based in Minneapolis, where the FBI has targeted Muslims and African immigrants. “The FBI has been harassing Somalis since I was in college. As a student, they used to just come to our student association, pull people out of class, all these things.”

Jumale added that some fellow activists, and particularly those who are not citizens, have scaled back their engagement in response to the surveillance, working “behind the scenes” but avoiding protests and public statements. But others noted that surveillance won’t succeed to intimidate a social justice movement that feels as urgent as ever.

“Activists today are knowledgeable and informed about COINTELRPO and previous iterations of surveillance of activists, and people are pretty hip to it. They understand the government may be watching them,” said Myaisha Hayes, an organizer with the racial justice group Media Justice whose grandfather spent 45 years in prison over his involvement with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. “When people are oppressed and they’re fighting for greater justice and liberation, there are very few things that are going to stop them.”

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Constitution Day 2019: The Hidden Domestic Surveillance Crisis – Just Security

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2019

Congress should investigate…

Don’t bank on it. The FIB knows too much.

https://www.justsecurity.org/66201/constitution-day-2019-the-hidden-domestic-surveillance-crisis/

by

As we mark the 232nd anniversary of the signing of America’s governing charter in 1787, we have ample evidence that it continues to be violated by the federal officials charged with upholding it.

Last month, The Young Turks (TYT) news and talk network obtained the FBI’s 2018-2020 “Consolidated Strategy Guide,” which not only referenced the targeting of so-called “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE’s) but also those designated as engaged in “Anti-Government/Anti-Authority Extremism,” “Abortion Extremism,” or “Animal Rights/Environmental Extremism.” In a House Oversight and Reform subcommittee hearing in June, FBI Counterterrorism Division Director Michael McGarrity had admitted under questioning that the FBI could not cite a single example of a murder that could be linked to any African American activist group, including Black Lives Matter. He also claimed that the Bureau had eliminated the entire category of “Black Identity Extremists” from its lexicon. The document obtained by TYT casts doubt on McGarrity’s claim, particularly given the use of the term “Black Racially Motivated Extremists” (BRME) elsewhere in the Guide.

The Guide does not disclose the precise criteria the FBI uses to label individuals or groups as extremists or alleged threats, but it does discuss in some detail the aggressive “intelligence collection” posture the FBI took against so-called BIE’s. Page 1 of the section on BIE’s contains the following:

“The FBIHQ-led Threat Mitigation Strategy IRON FIST was implemented to mitigate the potential threat posed by the BIE movement at the national level. IRON FlST will accomplish this by identifying actionable intelligence to directly support the initiation of FBI investigations and augment current efforts directed against BlEs. IRON FIST is designed to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing threat posed by BlEs, to proactively address this priority domestic terrorism target by focusing FBI operations via enhanced intelligence collection efforts. ln addition, FBIHQ works to develop potential [confidential human sources] CHSs and conduct assessments on the current BIE CHS base. Many BlEs are convicted felons who are prohibited possessors, therefore the FBI will continue to use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”

Indeed, this “Threat Mitigation Strategy” is a template that the FBI is applying to other groups and individuals designated as “White Supremacy Extremists” (WSEs), as revealed on page 1 of the section on WSE’s:

“The FBIHQ-led Threat Mitigation Strategy SUPREME RENDITION was implemented to mitigate the potential threat posed by WSE movements at the national level and will accomplish this by identifying actionable intelligence to directly support the initiation of FBI investigations and augment current efforts directed against WSEs. SUPREME RENDITION is designed to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing threat posed by WSEs, to proactively address this priority domestic terrorism target by focusing FBI operations via enhanced intelligence collection efforts. ln addition, FBIHQ works to develop potential CHSs and conduct assessments on the current WSE CHS base. Noting that many WSE subjects are convicted felons and are prohibited from legally possessing firearms, the FBI is exploiting the Dark Web or Dark Net to determine whether persons with a WSE ideology are using these non-indexed “hidden” websites and domains to procure firearms, explosives, murder-for-hire, or other illegal services in furtherance of their beliefs. Also, the FBI will use their prohibited possessor status as a tactic to assist in mitigating the threat for potential violence.”

The Threat of an Ideological Test

That the FBI is using an ideological test of its own devising to determine whether a person seeking products or services on “the Dark Web” is a threat raises a host of potential constitutional issues, including whether the monitoring of a person’s online activities based on their ideology runs afoul of the First Amendment or the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision…

Earlier this year, I submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI on 37 groups publicly working on immigration policy issues, some of them direct client-services organizations. Many of these FOIAs remain outstanding or are in varying stages of appeal or potential litigation. However, FBI FOIA responses received to date indicate that at least five of these groups — Chula Vista Partners in Courage, Pangea Legal Services, Immigration Hub, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), and the Transgender Law Center — may have been targeted for surveillance.

For each of the groups listed above, the FOIA appeal response I received from the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) contained the following language:

“To the extent that your request could encompass any national security or foreign intelligence records, I have determined that the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any national security or foreign intelligence records responsive to your request because the existence or nonexistence of any such responsive records is currently and properly classified. See 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1).”

In the world of FOIA, this kind of response is known as a “Glomar” — a reference to a 1981 FOIA case (Phillippi v. CIA, 655 F.2d 1325, 1327 (D.C. Cir. 1981), in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the CIA could refuse to confirm or deny even the very existence of information on a topic if the fact of its existence was itself deemed classified.

The 1981 case revolved around the efforts of a Rolling Stone reporter to get records of conversations between CIA Director William Colby and the heads of various news organizations that had learned about a Tom Clancy-like CIA operation to raise a sunken Soviet sub from the Pacific Ocean. The CIA’s argument, which the Court accepted, was that even the revelation of Colby’s efforts to kill the story would tip off the Soviets that the CIA might, in fact, have managed to salvage at least something from the sunken Soviet sub.

Since that 1981 D.C. appellate court decision, other federal courts have generally upheld executive branch invocations of Glomar responses to FOIA requests. In my view, those ill-considered decisions have now led to a much wider and far more dubious resort to Glomar responses by federal agencies and departments, in this case by the FBI as it relates to immigration policy activism by domestic U.S. groups.

For the five groups in question in my FOIA actions, the FBI is asserting FOIA’s “national security” or (b)(1) exemption in a Glomar context. How can the provision of legal advice, counseling or other services to immigrants represent “a threat to national security?”

A Role for Congress

Congress should investigate whether the FBI is targeting these groups in the absence of a legitimate criminal investigative predicate and is using the Glomar exception (or other dubious FOIA evasion tactics) to conceal that activity from the public and the courts…

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hoover

Yes son, you too can grow up to be lying scum and hate black people.

 

 

 

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