This is How the U.S. Government Convinces a Newspaper to Kill a Story

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 2.38.34 PMUnder President George W. Bush, the White House urged reporters to withhold accounts about many of the most contentious aspects in the war on terrorism: the existence of a secret prison in Thailand, the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program, warrantless wiretapping and government monitoring of financial transactions.

The Obama administration has persuaded reporters to delay publishing the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia, the name of a country in which a drone strike against an American citizen was being considered, the fact that a diplomat arrested in Pakistan was a C.I.A. officer and that an American businessman was working for the agency when he disappeared in Iran.

– From the New York Times article: Condoleezza Rice Testifies on Urging The Times to Not Run Article

The timidness with which mainstream media in the U.S. approaches news has been well documented. In fact, the inability of traditional media to do a reasonable job of holding powerful interests accountable has been one of the primary drivers behind the ascendency of alternative news. Despite this reality, one thing we know less about is specifically how the power structure goes about suppressing news it doesn’t want reaching the plebs. Until now.

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NOUS SOMME HYPOCRITES – Authoritarian, Anti-Free Speech Politicians Pose for Staged Photo Op in Paris

Screen Shot 2015-01-12 at 10.27.34 AMAs I was wrapping up my travels in Asia, an extremely sad event unfolded in Paris during which 12 people were murdered at the office of satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. Just four days later, another sad and pathetic event occurred. A swarm of politicians, many of whom are professional authoritarians, shamelessly descended onto the streets of Paris to “join millions of protesters” in a rally for free speech and solidarity with the victims of the barbaric attack.

As is typically the case, mainstream media stories were filled with powerful images of these political hacks marching arm in arm; faces austere, defiantly standing their ground on behalf of freedom and liberty the world over. You have doubtlessly seen many variations of the following:

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Such images were commingled with photos of the real march, which was estimated to include an incredible 3.7 million people.

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Such images can bring a tear to the eye of even the most hardened cynic. Politicians and citizens united for a noble cause! There’s just one minor problem. As the Huffington Post and Independent both noted, this is what the politicians’ march actually looked like:

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The War on Toddler Terrorists – Britain Wants to Force Nursery School Teachers to Identify “Extremist” Children

Screen Shot 2015-01-06 at 6.11.51 AMIt’s 8pm in Cambodia and time to find something to eat, but before I do, something caught my attention that I just have to share. It has to do with Great Britain’s continued insanity when it comes to it’s own version of the so-called “war on terror.” This topic will come as no surprise to regular readers, as I have previously highlighted the UK’s unique brand of Orwellianism on several occasions. Here are a couple of examples from late last year:

The UK’s Conservative Party Declares War on YouTube, Twitter, Free Speech and Common Sense

The BBC is Using Anti-Terror Surveillance to Find Tax Dodgers

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U.S. Government Wants to Charge $1,500 to Take a Photo in Federal Wilderness Areas

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 11.16.44 AMGo ahead and file this in the ever expanding category of: “WTF, how is this possible, America is becoming a crazy banana republic.”

When I first saw this headline, I was certain it had to be misleading. Someone had to be exaggerating in the pursuit of click-bait. Incredibly, it was another case of truth being stranger than fiction, with the article actually far worse than I imagined.

You ready for this? Have a seat, take a deep breath, and brace yourself for unbridled fascism. From OregonLive:

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Kentucky Man Arrested for “Terroristic Threatening” After Posting Song Lyrics to Facebook

Screen Shot 2014-09-08 at 12.14.28 PMIt seems as if the never-ending stream of American plebs being arrested for the most innocuous activities, things that were seen as completely normal just a few years ago, is continuing its irrational march forward toward peak nanny-statism, at which point everything will be criminalized.

This disturbing trend has been a key topic for Liberty Blitzkrieg in 2014. Here are the three most recent absurd cases from July and August alone:

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Tor Usage Soars in Turkey Following the Government’s Attempted Twitter Ban

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
– John Gilmore

We’ve already seen authoritarian governments lash out against Twitter in the recent pasti Most notably, last May when the Saudi “religious police chief” stated that “anyone using social media sites – and especially Twitter – “has lost this world and his afterlife”. You can read my article on the absurd incident here if you missed it. 

Last week, Turkey joined the list of Twitter haters amongst government, and attempted to ban the social media service. So what did the citizens of Turkey do? As John Gilmore predicted in 1993, they interpreted the censorship as damage and routed around it. From The Washington Post:

At first the Twitter ban was relatively easy to circumvent and quickly backfired asTwitter exploded with activity in the country. Because most ISPs were implementing the ban by Domain Name System redirection, users could simply change their DNS server to rely on a public server outside the country who wasn’t engaging in the same misdirection. But on Saturday, researchers saw a shift in the way the block was implemented. Instead of DNS redirection, Twitter now appears to be blocked at the IP level.

But there are still a few ways to circumvent the ban, including using a Virtual Private Network to forge an encrypted tunnel outside of Turkey, using SMS (the method tweeted about by Twitter’s policy account near the beginning of blocking efforts), and Tor. Because the anonymous browsing tool reroutes users’ traffic through onion nodes throughout the world, it helps users bypass local censorship.

Here’s an image that demonstrates the recent surge in Tor usage:

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JP Morgan Targets Twitter Activist and Subsequently Takes His Handle

In one of the more bizarre stories I have seen in a while, Dallas-based graphic designer Chase Giunta was forced to give up a Twitter handle he had been using for years after JP Morgan complained. He had been using the handle to retweet criticisms of the TBTF bank, and after he refused to sell the … Read more