Category: US Politics

Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

Amidst the reports of potential martial law, COVID hysteria, and arguments of stolen elections, there are accounts of an alleged “massive” hack attack against the U.S. government and major Fortune 500 companies.

While the details surrounding the hacking have yet to be released, it hasn’t stopped America’s judge, jury, and executioner – Mainstream Corporate Media – from declaring who the culprit is. Along with D.C. Swamp dwellers and Deep State stalwarts, MSM has reported the recent hacking as none other than Russia’s work.

I know. I know. Hold your surprise.

Predictably, the accusers have not offered a shred of evidence to prove or even back up their case against Russia. For his part, President Trump has denied that Russia had anything to do with the hack, downplaying the incident’s seriousness.

Instead, he makes a counterclaim that it was likely China who was behind the hacking. But Trump offered no evidence either.

What Happened?

A massive cyber breach allowed hackers to not only access but to spend months exploring several U.S. government and private companies’ systems around the globe. The hackers inserted malware into a software update from SolarWinds. (The company used by thousands of companies and federal agencies to monitor their computer networks.)

SolarWinds claims that nearly 18,000 of its customers in the private and public sector received the adulterated software between March and June of 2020.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stated the attack “poses a grave risk” to federal, state, and local governments and private companies and organizations. CISA noted that removing the malware would be “highly complex and challenging for organizations.” In other words, the full scale of the hacking is as of yet unknown.

Who was hacked? 

At this time, the U.S. government agencies hacked include: 

• Commerce Department

• Department of Homeland Security

• The Pentagon

• The Treasury Department

• USPS

• National Institutes of Health

• Department of Energy (where National Nuclear Security Administration software was also breached.)

However, the DOE has reassured the public by stating the hack was isolated to business networks and not national security operations. In other words, the hackers were not able to access classified material, just unclassified items.

Also, other government agencies, consulting, telecom, and technology companies from North America, Asia, Middle East, and Europe, according to FireEye, were hacked. (FireEye is the security firm to sound the alarm over the incident.)

As NPR reports,

After studying the malware, FireEye said it believes the breaches were carefully targeted: “These compromises are not self-propagating; each of the attacks require meticulous planning and manual interaction.”

Microsoft, which is helping investigate the hack, says it identified 40 government agencies, companies and think tanks that have been infiltrated. While more than 30 victims are in the U.S., organizations were also hit in Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

“The attack unfortunately represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them,” Microsoft’s President Brad Smith wrote.

“While governments have spied on each other for centuries, the recent attackers used a technique that has put at risk the technology supply chain for the broader economy,” he added.

Who Was Responsible?

Let’s get one thing out of the way. We don’t know yet.

As I stated at the beginning of this article, neither side presents information to bolster their case. For the sake of analysis, however, all sides (and some that remain unmentioned) must be considered.

Russia

Predictably, Deep State operatives and D.C. Swamp dwellers along with the mainstream media began crowing that Russia was behind the alleged hacking. According to them, it was just another incident in a long line of incidents that can be traced back to either Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, two individuals whom the limousine left views as essentially one person.

But none of these outlets or individuals have offered a bit of proof to back up their claims. It is hard to take any claims of “Russian aggression” seriously, considering the media, left, and Deep State spent two years using the “Russiagate” narrative to pressure and undercut the Trump administration (after nearly eight years of provoking Russia in Ukraine and Syria).

However, after a decade of provocation on its borders, attempted color revolutions, sanctions, and growing threats, it is logical that Russia would want to gather as much information as possible about American intentions.

However, the likelihood that the Russians would have risked such exposure of their intentions is out of character with its leadership. (Which has been keen to let the United States destroy itself at home and abroad, allowing Russia to swoop in and pick up the pieces.)

China

Trump has suggested China might be responsible for the hacking but has failed to show any proof. Of course, China has the motivation to hack American agencies and corporations as much as Russia and for many of the same reasons. Indeed, China has been more open than most countries about its spying operations.

Deep State

But what about a third option? At this point in the game, we have to assume one possible culprit would be actors within the United States government. Those not necessarily loyal to the national interests who would benefit from staging a hacking event to be blamed on the target country. After all, skilled hackers (as these were) can mask their locations, appearing to be in entirely different countries.

It is possible that Russia or China (possibly Iran) may have been blamed for a hacking they never committed.

All three of these possibilities are plausible.

At this point, we do not know who was responsible for the hack, and, even according to mainstream reports, we do not know the extent of the damage.

What we do know, however, is that no crisis will be left to waste.

This one will be no different.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

So don’t post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you’ll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence–or recourse in the courts.

That’s the competitive advantage of for-profit Totalitarianism–no legal recourse against the suppression of free speech and dissent. And if you’re shadow-banned as I was, you won’t even know just how severely your free speech has been suppressed because the Big Tech platforms are black boxes: no one outside the profit-maximizing corporation knows what its algorithms and filters actually do or exactly what happens to the disappeared / shadow-banned.

Shadow-banning is an invisible toxin to free speech: if you’re shadow-banned, you won’t even know that the audience for your posts, tweets, etc. has plummeted to near-zero and others can no longer retweet your content. You only see your post is online as usual, because this is the whole point of shadow-banning: you assume your speech is still free even as its been strangled to death by Big Tech black box platforms.

Since Andy Grove’s dictum only the paranoid survive is my Prime Directive, I’ve paid a bit more to have access to server traffic data. So I can pinpoint precisely when I was shadow-banned: my overall traffic fell off a cliff and the number of readers visiting from links on Big Tech platforms fell from thousands to near-zero.

The new consolidated Big Media Totalitarians play an interesting game of circular sources: in the traditional, now-obsolete / suppressed form of journalism, a reporter would be required to identify a minimum of three different sources for the story, and make at least a desultory effort to present two sides of the issue.

That model is out the window in the USSA’s Big Media Totalitarian regime. Now reporters only have to use a completely bogus, fabricated source in another Big Media story. Just being in another Big Media platform / publication is now "proof" that the source is legitimate.

In other words, investigative journalism is nothing but a Potemkin Village of circular sources conjured out of thin air by Big Media. Here’s an example from my own experience of being shadow-banned.

1. A completely bogus organization pops up out of nowhere and doesn’t bother identifying its owners, managers or sources.

2. This complete travesty of a mockery of a sham fabrication then issues a list of websites which it claims, with zero evidence, are stooges / outlets of Russian propaganda.

3. With zero investigation of this slanderous, evidence-free "source," the venerable Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) publishes an evidence-free hit piece glorifying this fabrication on Page One.

4. The other Big Media giants then amplify the bogus slander because it came from a "legitimate source," the Washington Post.

Do you understand how circular sourcing works now? Once a flagrantly bogus bit of propaganda is embraced by one Big Media giant as part of the Approved Narrative, then every other Big Media / Big Tech corporation promotes the fabrication as "real news" even as it is obviously the acme of "fake news", a complete fabrication.

The fake "source" was called PropOrNot, and the list included dozens of well-respected independent websites, all slandered with a completely fake accusation for one reason: each site had published some content that cast a skeptical eye on the crowning of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the crushing of Bernie Sanders’ campaign by Big Media’s Approved Narrative.

As long as you post videos of kittens and kids dancing, you’re OK because your content (owned and controlled by the platform you posted it on–read the terms of Service) is free to the platforms and they use your content to "engage" users which generates billions in profits.

But if you question the Approved Narrative, you put a big day-glo target on your back. Now if you’re a multi-millionaire, you know, a top 0.1% per-center, you can afford to keep posting dissenting views even after you’ve been demonetized and your income falls to near-zero.

The rest of us aren’t quite so privileged. This is another of the toxic elements in Big Media / Big Tech’s consolidated control of what was once known as free speech: They don’t have to ban your content outright, which might cause a few ripples of tame protest; all they have to do is starve you into submission by strangling your source of income.

Thanks to watertight terms of service, even a multi-millionaire is legally powerless against the USSA’s Big Media Totalitarian regime. By posting content, you already gave away all your rights. So you can go solo and post content on some obscure corner of the web that no one knows exist, but that’s the functional equivalent of being banned and demonetized.

So go right ahead and enter a sound-proof box and scream your head off; nobody can hear you. Welcome to the totally privately owned, legally untouchable Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime that will let you know what’s in the Approved Narrative because that’s all you’re allowed to see.

Gordon Long and I cover these topics and many more in our latest video Buying the Narrative (35:41) Since I’d like the video to actually be viewed more than 11 times, I avoided using the terms (censored), (censored) or (censored), and that’s the final fatal poison delivered by our profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime: self censorship. You know what you can’t say, so don’t say it. Stick with the kitten videos and you’ll be just fine.

You’ll be just fine but you no longer live in a functioning democracy. The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

It’s all fun and games until the pendulum of Totalitarian Consolidation and its Approved Narrative reaches an extreme (like, say, right now) and the pendulum swings back to an equal extreme at the other end of the spectrum. Keep in mind that hubris and money are no match for history: the more powerful you claim to be, the greater your fall. The way of the Tao is reversal.

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.’s Banquet of Consequences (December 8, 2020)

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