INFORMATION WARFARE

In the beginning, we thought we were going crazy. It just sort of snuck up on us, perplexing even we who thought were ‘in the know.’ We were fairly uncomfortable talking about it, because, well, it was weird. We would say or even think a thought only to watch the subject pop up on social media or in advertisements just moments later. It was gradual but returned with increased frequency.

Was it pareidolia or confirmation bias? A hyper sensory ability to observe context and peer into the future? Had we tapped into a new dimension or some sort of collective consciousness? Were our devices simply tracking and targeting us?

Would we even be able to tell the difference?

Across virtually any topic — the communications battle between citizens across the globe and the controllers of major media and Silicone Valley had effectively transformed a good chunk of cyberspace into a virtual warzone.

Though it may sound histrionic, propaganda has a well-documented history of inducing mass death and suffering. It decides elections. It manufactures consent for war.

Peer-reviewed research indicates that Internet algorithms can influence public policy by inflicting significant enough bias to skew U.S. election outcomes. Pound for pound, information is the most coveted asset on Earth.

With 90% of the media controlled by six corporations, the capacity for abject harm is now more robust and more concentrated than at any time in history, sprawling live into nearly every living room, pocket, purse and bedroom nightstand.

With cell phones alone transferring over 8 exabytes of traffic data per quarter, these devices have a virtually unlimited tap into the hearts, minds and wallets of the people they hold sway over. This machine is fully equipped to record and process daily patterns of life and user preferences, precise geo-location and the ambient sound and video of billions of people worldwide.

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Consider Google’s exploits with China and North Korea, how China compromised the technology supply chain of 30 U.S. companies including Apple and Amazon, Space X’s failed Facebook satellite launch that exploded on the launch pad, or that just one Saudi prince held significant stakes in ISIS-rampant Twitter, News Corp and Apple prior to having his assets frozen during the tortuous purge that ensnared at least 20 princes who were then strung up by their heels in the Ritz-Carlton.

The idea of information warfare as the harbinger of a dystopian era is a blockbuster in fiction but one that has already evolved real-world outcomes. The threat is undeniably real, and the concealment of these facts as otherwise serves to promote the interests of these dangerously unchecked digital entities.

The ultimate form of defense lies in every man, woman and child’s God-given ability to evaluate the evidential integrity of the information they conduit, using original source-material, logic and common sense.

Navigating such a turbulent information landscape to challenge each piece of disinformation can be an endless endeavor — rendering the people inundated and unable to fully inform the future they would otherwise be free to create.

True to form, the role of mass communications is to shape and drive socio-political narratives into the eyes and ears of preoccupied households. The media we consume redefines what is normal, what is desirable, what we fear and how we love. It redefines good and evil.

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As social animals subscribed to the same feed, we were led to believe this misrepresentation of reality was just the way it was — that we must adapt, despite our better judgment and core-level rejection of implanted maxims. Some of us knew what we were doing. We went along to get along.

It is a sophisticated machine, the rarely-seen aspects of which are two-fold: its virtually indescribable depth of reach and control into our everyday lives and its ability to alter, at will, the perception of our immediate reality.

More shockingly, it can hop bodies.

Whether in the belly of the beast itself or by any objective measure, it is clear that, if only by the nature of the business model, media and tech conglomerates are not founded to serve the objective interests of the population. This much, at this point, many will readily admit — while, many yet still can’t see or refuse to acknowledge.

To those who see, it is imperative to keep going. The purpose of this dispatch is to inform the resolve of the intellectually and emotionally courageous — those called to defend something so critical to human existence as information itself.

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Identifying the nature of and overcoming the ongoing concealment of what is in order to connect and negotiate a productive shared reality is a mind-bending trip on a journey of personal enlightenment and transformation into a symbiotic relationship with our environment and fellow man.

The opposite ends of its unraveled potential for utopia is its unchecked capacity for pain, chaos and destruction.

It is global. It is local. It bisects and transcends party affiliation, vocation, century, status and wealth, sex, color and creed. The mechanism behind which it works defies a coherent description because it is ethereal.

Semiosis or the meaning of signs and signals in communications is a process. It is as the idea of creation or evolution itself — the natural dance of social progress through competing visions, multifaceted insight and conflicting experiences — a terrain difficult enough to navigate on its own, now adulterated on a massive scale, with the assistance of space satellites.

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It is the muse of ancient philosophers, hermetic monks, theoretical physicists, neuroscientists, technocrats, statisticians, media men and psychologists to bridge and illustrate the map between self and other — to locate, interact with and impact self and whole as the case may be.

This is the story of the nature of reality and its exploitation.

Attempts to describe this paradigm span centuries of philosophy and religion, spawning countless ‘conspiracy theories,’ TV series, trilogies, new age/self-help spiritual hybrids, cult followings and kitschy references that inundate pop culture. It’s in everything — from the soda and food we eat and drink to whom we vote for or marry.

It records and interprets our conversations and delivers relevant messages tweaking our neurochemistry and designing real-world responses based on stealthy algorithmic patterns that determine what is relevant.

This describes both a Universal intelligence of organic human origins and the apparatus developed to control it, through mass surveillance, real-time content feedback and behavior modification.

While it is able to be sensed and even acknowledged, spending some serious time with it bends the imagination on the invisible war between free will and an adaptable machine interface controlled by hostile interests — the abuses of which could irreversibly alter the trajectory of the human race.

The question becomes who or what is at the controls and to what end?

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Belly of the Beast

When I was young, fearless and following what I thought was my dream, I got a glimpse into the grunt-level underpinnings of this machine and into my own personal hell. The corruption grew denser the further up the ladder. It wasn’t perfectly coordinated but it was moving in tandem along a similar path of self-interest and what ‘sells.’

Money controlled the news, and the bulk of money wasn’t coming from the readers. They appealed to our most basic human instincts and drive for social inclusion, food, safety, sex, power, and a sense of purpose.

The sinking feeling of being trapped in a mass delusion wasn’t something I could exactly describe or tell anyone about until #FakeNews became a hashtag decades later. Now, there is little dispute that it exists but merely the scope of it that defies imagination.

The lack of any real identifiable coordination between everyday white-collar workers is the barrier people often encounter when considering the scope of the operation.

Everyone can’t be in on it. The problem is that we don’t know if we are in on it.

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Editors pull from a set of stories on the wire, subscribed to by media corporations across the world. Beyond local news, the daily itinerary features the same stories, though they appear with some variations in content and length. Higher-ups who have meetings with other higher-ups slate lead stories in advance. Editors piece together related material out from the same pot. Aside from some uncontrollable minor improvisations, the narrative holds.

The relationship between the general populace, including those who graduate to media vocations and the pounding narrative that surrounds them both is akin to a hierarchy of narcissists and the abused.

It involves heaps of gaslighting, the projection and coerced adoption of the abuser’s negative traits onto and by their victims by producing an artificial pulse in order to align our reality closer to theirs.

It is a hierarchy of bureaucratic slaves, and their most potent driving force is the replication of fear incongruent with reality, abstracted and redirected from actual experience, not much unlike the way actors conjure emotion in a play.

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It is not beyond the present frontier that the system selects candidates for certain roles and influence. Some are clearly bought off or blackmailed, but the vast majority of those on the lower ranks are influenced indirectly, polarized and emotionally manipulated in tech silos by messages that conjure up delicate histories and their own need to overcome these, even if superficially.

This is true of the general population as well.

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Astroturfing

A significant portion of the population has self-ejected from mainstream narratives, finding cover in yet another layer of information matrices with independent and alternative media.

These spaces, too, are infiltrated.

Grassroots creative and alternative info markets have been subject to the same controls, reduced to despotism through spec work and globalized markets, software monopolies, astroturfing, honeypots, selective boosting and suppression.

As an example, consider the context and complexity of the connected entities surrounding WikiLeaks.

Two of the architects of SecureDrop, the whistleblower software deployed after WikiLeaks’ Tor submission system went offline, namely Reddit founder Aaron Swartz and James Dolan, both died of apparent suicide. The third SecureDrop founder can still be found lightly covering aspects of these connected platforms and their misadventures as editor for Wired Magazine.

Snowden, who was first forged in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prior to his rendezvous with the National Security Agency (NSA), now sits at the end of the table of the board of directors of Freedom Press Foundation (FPF), which once funded WikiLeaks.

Hollywood directed our attention to the far-reaching capabilities and abuses of government surveillance. Although eye-opening, Snowden’s narrowed focus tends to leave unrestrained and poorly regulated corporate data collection and big tech with a comparatively free pass.

In 2013, Freedom Press Foundation, affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which aimed to remove the final barrier — ISP gatekeepers’ ability to stall the advance of media monopolies, calling it “Net Neutrality” — took over the development of SecureDrop.

EFF hosts hackathons for the software and has received multiple six-figure contributions from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

Billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, also held significant shares with PayPal, the company that withdrew the funding mechanism for the WikiLeaks platform. FPF then organized to raise funding for WikiLeaks, before they too eventually abandoned support.

Omidyar is also the founder of First Look Media, the parent company of the online news site The Intercept.

Intercept cofounder Glenn Greenwald, who led the NSA reporting for a Pulitzer for the Guardian, shares a seat at the FPF table with his subject, Snowden.

Julian Assange did not hide the apparent falling out with FPF over its subsequent abandonment of WikiLeaks, likening the board to rats on social media.

The Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), Omidyar Network, and Google.org partnered on a $17 million-dollar Investment Company for startups. Even Facebook co-founder and critic Chris Hughes joined their elite philanthropic ranks, with a $10 million “anti-monopoly fund,” backed by Soros and Omidyar.

Having involvement with prior color revolutions throughout the decades in other countries, Soros and Open Society funding is currently linked to organizations that include Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

This is just one but a significant example of a cursory dig into the tangled web of economic pressure and influence over ‘alternative’ media and even more alarming, popular whistleblower platforms — an illustration of the potential avenues for exploitation, astroturfing and costly honeypots.

These influencers contribute towards the management of information. Even leaked or declassified information is subject to selective release and ad hoc redaction across all platforms, including usurpers within our own three letter agencies.

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YEAR OF THE RAT

The year began with harrowing social media scenes of mosh-pit waiting rooms and citizens lining the roads outside of Chinese hospitals. We saw ghost towns, trucks full of body bags, incinerators working overtime and people barricaded into their homes as agents wearing white HAZMAT coveralls forced others into unmarked vans.

Managing to escape the heavily censored Chinese bandwidth, recordings of distressed citizens flooded Twitter. Facing an impending pandemic of disease and starvation, they risked everything to send out these messages — to warn the world of what was coming.

Avid researchers feverishly refreshed Johns Hopkins’ Resident Evil-styled dashboard1 as it ticked up the recovered and dead at a remarkable rate of 50% according to China’s initial reporting.

It looked bad. Doomsday bad.

The next day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern2 and reiterated Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s warning against limiting travel and trade913, the State Department began the process of imposing the highest global level travel advisories on coronavirus hotspots.3

The Trump administration’s task force artfully navigated the move as ‘complementary’ to WHO’s announcement. It wasn’t complementary. It was in direct defiance.

Some of the more inquisitive reporters challenged the WHO on China’s response and absence of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). The WHO had some interesting answers.

Director of the Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department Sylvie Briand said that trained health professionals would get too cocky if they had PPE — that they would forget to wash their hands.13

The Executive Director of WHO's Health Emergencies Michael Ryan topped that with a metaphor — giving frontline healthcare workers the PPE they need would be akin to burdening a novice with scuba equipment and telling them to go jump into the ocean.13

It was clear the WHO were shamelessly running PR for China.

The White House established the Coronavirus Task Force and held lengthy daily press briefings in collaboration with the NIH and CDC, culminating in the 15 Day Plan to Slow the Spread, then 30 Days to Slow the Spread, then a phased plan to open up, followed by the infamous ‘second wave.’

The nation entered summer with ‘illegal’ haircuts, banned worship, mandatory masks, sand-filled skate parks, Interstate checkpoints, and shutdown shorelines and beaches.

The Navy hospital ships, Mercy and Comfort embarked battle. Makeshift field hospitals were constructed in parks and convention centers. The National Guard was deployed. Distilleries repurposed their outfits to produce hand sanitizer. Ford turned out face shields, respirators and facemasks. It was mass mobilization against an invisible enemy — a whole-of-nation effort.

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THE INVISIBLE ENEMY

At first, the Trump administration was cautiously optimistic. Given a whole-of-nation effort, positivity over alarmism to safeguard markets, reserve PPE and mitigate a mad dash for resources, would have been considered prudent. It soon became clear, however, that not everyone was on the same page, and that some leaders supplanted measured optimism with unconscionable erraticism.

Within hours of the Trump administration’s announcement of tide-turning travel restrictions on persons in China within 14 days of attempted entry, Joe Biden — or whoever writes Joe Biden’s tweets — called Trump hysterical and xenophobic.5

In late February, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did a presser gleefully encouraging outside tourism to San Francisco’s Chinatown.11

Out of character, and in an apparent breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders by neglecting the obvious opportunity to sell the usual (and this time, supposedly well-justified) fear porn, the news said it was nothing more than the flu.

Talking heads peddled the narrative that the president had called the virus itself a hoax, when he was indisputably referring to the Democrats’ response.

Acting against federal guidelines8, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration packed over 4,500 COVID-19 positive patients into nursing homes4, with these facilities accounting for as many as 42% of coronavirus deaths10.

Federal lawmakers launched a furious inquiry into what happened in the Democrat-led states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Michigan* over possible misconduct at these long-term care facilities — actions that had been condemned at the outset by the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

These nefarious methods tallied a third of the overall mortality pie in just 26 states, with Democrat-led Rhode Island racking up a whopping 81% of the state’s coronavirus deaths.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/29/885018594/senators-call-for-investigation-of-states-nursing-home-policies-during-pandemic

https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/state-data-and-policy-actions-to-address-coronavirus/

Read that again.

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As the US instituted travel advisories, the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on coronavirus coverage, banned American journalists and phenomenally started reporting zero new cases.

Despite destroying samples, gagging epidemiologists and having the WHO tweet that the novel virus wasn’t transmissible between humans a week before 3 billion trips commenced to celebrate the Lunar New Year, Chinese officials blamed the US Army for starting the virus*.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destroyed-proof-of-virus-in-december-rz055qjnj

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-20/china-readies-for-world-s-biggest-human-migration-quicktake

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html