Veteran journalist Glenn Greenwald recently took aim at the current establishment mania over “disinformation”. Anyone, Greenwald said, “who claims to be: a ‘disinformation expert’, an ‘anti-extremist expert’, an ‘online safety expert’ is a fraud”. Greenwald probably hasn’t heard of the likes of Siouxsie Wiles, Kate Hannah or Byron Clark, but he already has their number.
These are fake expertises that do not exist, that are inherently politicized and subjective, and that are designed to disguise ideology as science.
Twitter
More dangerously, they’re Orwellian terms disguised to hide a very, very Orwellian agenda. Big Brother really is watching. ThoughtCrime is real.
Labeling some speech as ‘mis-and-disinformation’ has become a convenient way for governments to justify tracking and attempting to control the expression of dissenting views, including those of journalists and MPs, as a new report from the UK shows.
A new report from UK civil liberties and privacy advocates Big Brother Watch, reveals the shocking but predictable fact that the British government has been spying, tracking and censoring its own citizens, politicians and journalists, over the supposed threat of ‘misinformation’.
This is, of course, nothing new for authoritarian regimes. The panopticon spy states of the Nazis and the Communists were the very reason Orwell penned 1984 as a dire warning. Except that today’s authoritarian regimes in the West are using it as an instruction manual.
Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech compiles information received through Official Information Act requests and Subject Access Reports (when a citizen requests information held on them by government agencies) to uncover five secretive and largely unaccountable units embedded in Government ministries that have been monitoring, reporting and actively censoring the public and important arms of democratic machinery in covid times.
Big Brother Watch founder and director Silkie Carlo said it had uncovered an alarming case of mission creep, in which public money and military power were being misused against the British people.
In true Orwellian fashion, these Stasi units operate completely contrary to everything the government publicly proclaims.
“Contrary to their stated aims, these government truth units are secretive and harmful to our democracy. The Counter Disinformation Unit should be suspended immediately and subject to a full investigation,” she said.
The Obama administration secretly and illegally launched a massive domestic spying program a decade ago. Britain and New Zealand are fast catching up.
The units revealed are:
The Rapid Response Unit (RRU), part of the Cabinet Office tasked with “tackling a range of harmful narratives online” during the pandemic, “from purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation, to criminal fraudsters running phishing scams”.
Except, as we’ve seen, the most dangerous misinformation, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to “Covid vaccines are safe and effective”, was coming from the government itself.
The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) monitors what it deems to be disinformation and flags content to social media companies, sits inside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Government Information Cell (GIC) focused on identifying and countering Russian disinformation in the UK and abroad in response to the war in Ukraine. It was established by the Foreign Office.
Research, Intelligence and Communications Unit (RICU) operates to push official lines that support counter-extremism and has even set up domestic front organisations to publish propaganda. It sits within the Home Office.
COINTELPRO, anyone?
The 77th Brigade is a Ministry of Defence counter disinformation unit, made up “a combined Regular and Army Reserve unit” which aims to “challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries”.
Nobody is safe from the new Stasi. Even government MPs, like David Davis, were targeted, for the heinous thoughtcrime of questioning Covid modelling from Imperial College. Modelling, we now know, was as disastrously, ludicrously wrong as its modelling on everything from BSE to foot-and-mouth.
Subsequently, Davis said:
“Big Brother Watch’s findings should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who knows the dangers of the overmighty state. Journalists, politicians and members of the public should all be free to air their views without examination by Government agencies.
“Privacy and free speech are fundamentally important values. But in the war on ‘misinformation’, they are being put at risk. It is time for a serious rethink at the heart of Government.”
Sounds like some kind of counter-revolutionary, comrades. Best send him to a re-education camp.
In an ironic twist, the government’s Stasi units seemed hell-bent on proving their critics right.
Other journalists monitored by the CDU were Laura Dodsworth, author of State of Fear, a book examining the use of a behavioural insights team to ‘nudge’ the British public into covid compliance using fear, and Toby Young, associate editor of the Spectator, editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic and director of the Free Speech Union.
The Looking Glass
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.
Arthur C. Clarke had a reputation for projecting the future, but in at least one instance, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Clarke claimed that “Big Brother could be watching you, but he probably can’t be bothered”.
As we now know, he can be very, very much bothered, indeed.