The American Stasi (FBI and DHS) Use Hired Snitches To Spy on Online Dissidents

in #liberty10 months ago

Originally posted on Quora May 16, 2023

Federal LEOs and Intel agencies outsourcing their internet surveillance to “threat intelligence” contractors is nothing new, but the brazen manner in which they’ve turned the business from keeping tabs on hackers and radical Muslims linked to Al Qaeda to infiltrating and spying on any political dissidents who dare venture outside the narrowing Overton window is new and the targets are often benign: everyone from workers opposing corporate and state vaccine mandates on telegram to gamers in private discord servers. Most of these surveillance capitalists, such as Flashpoint (started by an NBC new contributor in 2010), Zerofox (created in 2013), Israeli contractor CyberInt (who specializes in detecting child “threat actors”) and Recorded Future (a joint investment by In-Q-Tel and Alphabet Inc) have their origins in the post 9/11 hysteria and have pivoted towards anti-state and anti-corporate activist chat rooms and private game servers to retain their lucrative federal contracts. So instead of trying to infiltrate the invite only chat rooms of radical clerics they are instead reduced to infiltrating private telegram channels for workers opposed to vaccine mandates, pipeline protestors and the private discord servers of gamers.

“Progressives” have used the recent pentagon leaks on a private discord server to agitate for more dragnet surveillance of private chat rooms and servers ostensibly using the same surveillance capitalists who profited from the original war on terror as proxies for DHS, FBI, NSA and DIA agents, whom the Snowden leaks revealed had previously used their own personnel to infiltrate and spy on gamers, to work around the 4th amendment protections against politically motivated fishing expeditions that adhere to the Stalinist maxim show me the man and I’ll find the crime.

Renée DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who has worked alongside Department of Homeland Security efforts to police online speech, has seized upon the so-called Discord Leaks to call for more monitoring of chat rooms. DiResta recently co-authored an essay in Foreign Policy to suggest that online gamers and chat rooms have "eclipsed spies as an intelligence threat":

You’ll recall Twitter tapped the Stanford Internet Observatory and their “virality project” to scrub the platform of inconvenient medical facts they deemed “malinformation” such as true stories of covid vaccine injuries and the “conspiracy theory” about natural immunity. The SIO was also in charge of the Election Integrity Project that flagged posts deemed election “misinformation” in 2020 and the Hamilton 68 Project that smeared civil libertarians and anyone right of center and anti-establishment as “Russian agents” and their content as “Russian influence” as far back as 2017. Of course, totalitarian shitbags are never satisfied with only controlling public conversations on social media; even private ones must be monitored and controlled in their crusade against wrongthink.

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The other cheerleaders for the phony war on terrorism are the usual leftoid rags Salon and Time Magazine.

“The FBI and other law enforcement organizations are not spending enough time trolling the edges of the web like Discord and Telegram,” veteran reporter Lucian Truscott IV declared in Salon, a progressive news outlet.

A news article in Time took the validity of national-security officials’ concerns about Discord as a given. “The leak has also put a spotlight on the lack of law-enforcement visibility into platforms like Discord,” wrote Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan.

But in a sea of corporate shills and stooges there are always a few honest men who fight for the rights of common people.

FBI Surveillance Contractor Probed Anti-Mandate Activists

Private Spies Hired By The FBI and Corporate Firms Infiltrate Discord, Reddit and WhatsApp

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