Archive
“State of control”, a shocking and revealing documentary.
Posted December 2022. Find 74min Documentary with Trailer Here:-
The control society is increasingly becoming a reality.
What is the price of convenience?
The CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and the digital passport can make our lives easier and more efficient. But new international legislation shows that the purpose of these possibilities, has far-reaching implications for our privacy.
In this documentary international experts such as Edward Snowden, Arno Wellens, Catherine Austin Fitts express their serious concerns and criticisms. It compiles the range of facts and opinions, creating a shocking picture about the future of mankind. A crystal-clear narrative that can”t be ignored.
‘The Government should be afraid because they’re behaving unforgivably’ – Neil Oliver
Posted 26th November 2022. Find 11min Video Here:-
Neil Oliver gives his take on the UK Government’s management of the cost of living and the energy crisis.
Remember This: These (US) Groups Were Exempted From Getting COVID Shots in 2020. Never Forget This.
Posted 2nd November 2022. Find 1min 30sec Audio Here:-
From Jeff Rense 15th September 2021. Figures for the USA.
All of Congress plus all Congressional Staff.
6000 White House employees all exempted.
2,500 Pfizer Employees exempted.
1,500 Moderna Employees exempted.
120,000 Johnson & Johnson Employees exempted.
15,000 CDC Employees exempted.
14,000 FDA Employees exempted.
8 Million Chinese Students in the US exempted.
2 Million immigrants exempted.
500, 000 Homeless, Tent and Street people exempted.
The Public Order Bill takes us another step closer to the UK becoming a police state.
Posted 2nd November 2022. Find 7min Video Here:-
Longstanding champion of human rights in the UK, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti tore into the Bill: “This Bill bears closer resemblance to anti-terror law than measures aimed at addressing moments when peaceful dissent crosses a line into significant public nuisance.” If you want to support our work fighting for a freer future, please join us: https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/join/n… And make sure you subscribe to our mailing list for breaking news and action alerts! https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/subscr...
The EU’s biometric power-grab is sinister and grotesque.
By SILKIE CARLO 16th October 2022. Find Article Here:-
Brussels is rolling out an invasive new border system that will cause massive delays, and further undermine our liberty.
If you’re planning to escape to a chateau next summer, brace yourself for pointless chaos and travel disruption, thanks to the EU’s latest Orwellian move to demand holiday-makers’ biometric data at its borders. Brits hopping across the Channel will first have their fingerprints and photos taken. The new mass data-gathering scheme, which will go live in May, is part of the evolution of a so-called “Smart Border”.
But there is nothing “smart” about the plans. The data grab has been justified by the aim of improving detection of dangerous travellers, finding vulnerable people, and reducing fraud, but it comes at an eye-watering cost to liberty and logistics. The border plans have been rightly described by civil society groups as “disproportionate and unnecessary”, while the Port of Dover’s boss has warned of “significant and continued disruption for a very long time”.
All travellers aged over 12 will need to be biometrically logged, creating an EU datastore loaded with hundreds of millions of people’s unique personal data. The EU is demanding not only a US-style set of four fingerprints, but facial images too. Holiday-makers’ personal information will be mixed in with eventually billions of pieces of data, spanning photographs, palm prints, DNA records and facial biometrics, to which controversial recognition algorithms can be applied. This may be the biggest biometric data collection operation in European history. What could possibly go wrong?
Too many of our European friends have an indifferent attitude to the emergence of a data-hungry superstate – over 1.7 billion EU Digital Covid Certificates were issued during the pandemic – but even those falling out of love with liberté must be concerned about the disastrous impact on tourism and transport. The Big Brother-style EU border checks are estimated to take seven times longer than checks today and the tailback at Dover could grow by 19 miles – roughly the distance of the Channel crossing itself.
It is ironic but not entirely surprising that the Schengen Area, supposedly defined by freedom of movement, is becoming a digital fortress. Authorities are adopting extreme technologies on the seemingly neutral premise of progress, but this is not simply a process of modernisation – it is a process of political metamorphosis.
It risks edging us towards a bleak future mirroring the kind of techno-totalitarianism modelled by China. And the biometric super-database is by no means the only disturbing technological development on European borders – in 2019, the EU trialled Minority Report-style AI “lie detectors” to scan passengers” faces in a highly controversial, poorly evidenced system called iBorderCtrl.
Meanwhile, police are using similar technologies in the UK, rolling out live facial recognition cameras, mobile fingerprinting devices, and according to a speech by the new Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley last week, finding “precriminal” online activity and using predictive analytics to target men who might become violent towards women in the future. Yet he said nothing about the thousands of reports every year of rape and domestic violence that are poorly investigated and rarely prosecuted.
Distinctly European values are falling between the cracks in the technological revolution – our cherished liberty, the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. Last week, the head of GCHQ warned about China’s use of technology to exert control and of its “draconian” development of a “surveillance culture”. But if we are to criticise China with any authority, we must first show leadership in using technology to advance and protect liberty at home.
Silkie Carlo is director of Big Brother Watch
Distracted and Diverted by Political Pantomime, the UK is Rapidly Headed Toward Dictatorship.
Posted 22nd October 2022. Find Article and 7min Video Here:-
Mike Robinson (from UK Column) explains the enormous scope of the legislation which is oh so quietly moving forward and will have such an impact on the rights and freedoms we take for granted.
National Security Bill
Report on UK use of covert powers
Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) report
Sources:
UK Column News – 19th October 2022 ( extract)
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/uk-column-news-19th-october-2022
Archive on demand, latest discussions, community groups and more: https://community.uk
Freedom for all means freedom for nasty people.
By PETER HITCHENS. 30th July 2022. Find Article Here:-
Today I need to defend a person I do not much like. I will explain why I do not like him in a moment, but that is not the important bit.
What matters is this: if the Government can just reach out and ruin a man’s life, without any need of a fair hearing or a guilty verdict, then we do not live in a free country. This is what has just happened to the video blogger Graham Phillips.
The danger is that, because Mr Phillips is so hard to like, the Government will get away with it. And then, when it uses the same powers on somebody else, it will be too late to protest.
As the great US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said: ‘The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.’
What matters is this: if the Government can just reach out and ruin a man’s life, without any need of a fair hearing or a guilty verdict, then we do not live in a free country. This is what has just happened to the video blogger Graham Phillips
Some of Mr Phillips’s activities have been questionable, though he firmly denies many of the charges against him. For me, his worst action was his cruel and stupid questioning of a badly wounded Ukrainian prisoner of war. Others have condemned his interview of Aiden Aslin, a British citizen who had been fighting with Ukrainian armed forces and was captured by the Russians.
It has been suggested that the interview was a breach of the Geneva Conventions. Mr Phillips, contacted in Lugansk, says Mr Aslin asked for the interview himself, has never complained, and has given several other interviews since.
Be that as it may, last week Mr Phillips was placed on the UK Government’s sanctions list. The Foreign Office, which is in charge of this process, no longer answers the phone, and replies only once to emails, with bland official statements, so I do not have some of the details that I would like to have.
But as far as I know, he is the first British citizen to be treated in this way. His assets have been frozen. His bank accounts are blocked. He also cannot pay those to whom he owes money.
For example, his home insurance has now been cancelled because his insurers are forbidden to accept his premiums. All his bills will now bounce, the utilities at his London home will soon be cut off. He cannot even pay his council tax. He will face incessant claims for debts, which he can do nothing about.
As he says: ‘How can I pay these debts when I don’t have access to funds? If it goes to court, how can I defend myself when I won’t be able to pay for legal representation? Actually, how will I even find the money to travel to the court without money, or even feed myself?’ Franz Kafka, the great Czech author of The Trial, a classic about oppression, could not have invented a legal mantrap as inescapable as this.
Leading British lawyers have accurately described the objects of this action as ‘prisoners of the state’. Very well, you may say, this is how we must act against money-launderers and terrorists abroad.
You might equally well say that such powers could be used against officials of the Russian government, or officers in the Syrian Army. And if you look at the list of people treated in this way under the Sanctions and Money Laundering Act of 2018, that is who you will find.
Of course, none of these people is a former UK civil servant with a British passport, as Mr Phillips is. As long as they stay out of our reach, the sanctions are just an inconvenience to most of those placed under them.
But for Mr Phillips, they mean actual ruin. Whatever you think of him, is this a proper use of state power? Is it allowed by Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, let alone by the ‘human rights’ the Foreign Office claims to be so fond of?
The official declaration says Mr Phillips is being sanctioned because he is ‘a video blogger who has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilise Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence of Ukraine’.
Well, so what? None of these actions is or ought to be a crime under British law. These are catch-all charges, of the sort Stalin used in his show trials in the 1930s. Any protest against or criticism of a foreign state (or our own) could be said to do these things.
Lots of us have pretty critical views of the way various foreign countries behave, and of our own government.
Britain is not, in fact, at war with Russia. So there is no legal duty on any of us to support that war or refrain from saying things which upset the Kiev government.
This is the dictatorial use of arbitrary power by the State against an individual it does not like. It is a straightforward outrage against the rule of law. If the Government gets away with it, who will be next?
If we do not protest against it now, and stop it, then we should shut up forever about being a free country or fighting for freedom elsewhere.
Knotty political problem of ties
Why should it be Right-wing to wear a tie? A vast row has broken out in the French parliament about the wearing of this odd garment, wildly expensive, inclined to dangle into your food and impossible to clean afterwards.
Conservatives say they must be worn. Leftists refuse. Witty female MPs have responded by adopting ties themselves.
Actually, they look better on women than they do on men. Though that is not difficult.
Let the word ‘appeaser’ rest in peace
We love to hate appeasement, don’t we? If anyone suggests we try to make peace in Ukraine (as I do), he is immediately denounced as an ‘appeaser’. But what did the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble do, except help appease the IRA?
On his death last week, he was much praised. But in a slightly different universe, he would have been scorned. One man’s peacemaker is another man’s appeaser, and vice-versa. Why, even Winston Churchill appeased Stalin at Yalta, handing Eastern Europe over to him.
I think it is time we gave this worn-out word a decent burial.
TV cameras will damage justice
One of my weirdest reporting assignments was the Bobbitt case, in which Mrs Lorena Bobbitt cut off the manhood of her husband, John. As this happened just outside Washington DC, where I was then working, I had to attend the trials of both of them – hers for the grisly act, his for ‘marital sexual assault’.
Hers was televised. His – because it was for a sexual crime – was not. Both, as it happened, were acquitted. But the contrast between the two trials was huge. In the televised one, everyone was keenly aware of the vast audience outside the courtroom and, in my view, influenced by it.
Television has done dreadful damage to Parliament, with ghastly organised barracking and fake outrage all the time. It will do even more damage to criminal justice. Juries are bound to be influenced by TV cameras, as are judges and lawyers. The ‘experiment’ with televising courts should end now.
To comment on Peter Hitchens click here
The hidden harms in the UK’s Online Safety Bill.
By Jonathan Sumption 20th August 2022. Find Article Here:-
Weighing in at 218 pages, with 197 sections and 15 schedules, the Online Safety Bill is a clunking attempt to regulate content on the internet. Its internal contradictions and exceptions, its complex paper chase of definitions, its weasel language suggesting more than it says, all positively invite misunderstanding. Parts of it are so obscure that its promoters and critics cannot even agree on what it does.
Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, says that it is all about protecting children and vulnerable adults. She claims it does nothing to limit free speech. Technically, she is right: her bill does not directly censor the internet. It instead seeks to impose on media companies an opaque and intrusive culture of self-censorship – which will have the same effect.
As things stand, the law distinguishes between online publishers (like The Spectator) that generate content and can be held responsible for it; and online intermediaries (Google, Facebook, etc) that merely provide online facilities and have no significant editorial function. Mere intermediaries have no obligation to monitor content and are only required to take down illegal material of which they are aware.
The Online Safety Bill will change all this. The basic idea is that editorial responsibility for material generated by internet users will be imposed on all online platforms: social media and search engines. They will have a duty to ‘mitigate and manage the risks of harm to individuals’ arising from internet use.
A small proportion of the material available on the internet is truly nasty stuff. There is a strong case for carefully targeted rules requiring the moderation or removal of the worst examples. The difficulty is to devise a way of doing this without accidentally suppressing swaths of other material. So the material targeted must be precisely defined and identifiable. This is where the Online Safety Bill falls down.
Some of the material targeted by the bill is obviously unacceptable. Illegal content, such as material promoting terrorism or the sexual exploitation of children, must be moderated or taken down. Such content is already banned under existing legislation. It is defined by law and can be identified with a fair degree of accuracy. Some material, notably pornographic images, must be restricted to adults: in practice, this requires online age verification. So far, so good.
The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but ‘harmful’. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause ‘harm’ to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any ‘physical or psychological harm’. As if that were not general enough, ‘harm’ also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.
This test is almost entirely subjective. Many things which are harmless to the overwhelming majority of users may be harmful to sufficiently sensitive, fearful or vulnerable minorities, or may be presented as such by manipulative pressure groups. At a time when even universities are warning adult students against exposure to material such as Chaucer with his rumbustious references to sex, or historical or literary material dealing with slavery or other forms of cruelty, the harmful propensity of any material whatever is a matter of opinion. It will vary from one internet user to the next.The whole concept of restricting material which is entirely legal is a patronising abuse of legislative power
If the bill is passed in its current form, internet giants will have to identify categories of material which are potentially harmful to adults and provide them with options to cut it out or alert them to its potentially harmful nature. This is easier said than done. The internet is vast. At the last count, 300,000 status updates are uploaded to Facebook every minute, with 500,000 comments left that same minute. YouTube adds 500 hours of videos every minute. Faced with the need to find unidentifiable categories of material liable to inflict unidentifiable categories of harm on unidentifiable categories of people, and threatened with criminal sanctions and enormous regulatory fines (up to 10 per cent of global revenue). What is a media company to do?
The only way to cope will be to take the course involving the least risk: if in doubt, cut it out. This will involve a huge measure of regulatory overkill. A new era of intensive internet self-censorship will have dawned.
The problem is aggravated by the inevitable use of what the bill calls ‘content moderation technology’, i.e. algorithms. They are necessarily indiscriminate because they operate by reference to trigger text or images. They are insensitive to context. They do not cater for nuance or irony. They cannot distinguish between mischief-making and serious debate. They will be programmed to err on the side of caution. The pious injunctions in the bill to protect ‘content of democratic importance’ and ‘journalistic content’ and to ‘have regard to’ the implications for privacy and freedom of expression are unlikely to make much difference.
As applied to adults, the whole concept of restricting material which is entirely legal is a patronising abuse of legislative power. If the law allows me to receive, retain or communicate some item of information in writing or by word of mouth, how can it rationally prevent me from doing the same thing through the internet? Why should adult internet users be infantilised by applying to them tests directed to the protection of the most sensitive minorities? There are surely better ways of looking after the few who cannot look after themselves.
It is bad enough to be patronised by law, but worse to be patronised by official discretion. The bill will empower Ofcom, the regulator, to publish codes of practice with ‘guidance’ and ‘recommendations’, which will become the benchmark for regulatory action against internet intermediaries. All this will happen under the beady eyes of ministers. Ultimate power lies with the secretary of state, who can direct them to change their guidance and specify categories of material which she regards as harmful.
What might these categories be? The government’s White Paper and public statements by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport suggest that they will include ‘misinformation and disinformation’. There have been suggestions that this might include climate change denial and Covid disinformation. Ministers will say, citing section 190(4), that their policies are aimed at the public good, so that material which undermines them causes harm. It is no good saying that Ms Dorries is a nice lady who would never do anything so horrid. Her successors may not be. In a society which has always valued freedom of expression and dissent, these are powers which no public officer ought to have.
We had a glimpse of this brave new world during the pandemic. Facebook, YouTube and the like were keen to curry favour with the government and stave off statutory regulation by taking a ‘responsible’ view of controversial questions. YouTube’s self-censorship policy was designed to exclude ‘medical misinformation’, which it defined as any content which ‘contradicts guidance from the World Health Organisation or local health authorities’. Criticism of government policy by David Davis MP and Talk Radio were temporarily taken down. The Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific society, proposed ‘legislation and punishment of those who produced and disseminated false information’ about vaccines. This kind of thing is based on the notion that intellectual enquiry and the dissemination of ideas should be subordinated to authority. What the Royal Society meant by ‘false information’ was information inconsistent with the scientific consensus as defined by some recognised scientific authority, such as themselves.
The Online Safety Bill has been put on hold until the new prime minister takes office. So it is worth reminding the successful candidate why Britain has traditionally rejected attempts by the state to control the flow of information. In part, it is an instinctive attachment to personal freedom. And in part it is a recognition of the politically dangerous and culturally destructive results.
All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change. Once upon a time, the scientific consensus was that the sun moved around the Earth and that blood did not circulate around the body. These propositions were refuted only because orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics. Knowledge advances by confronting contrary arguments, not by hiding them away. Any system for regulating the expression of opinion or the transmission of information will end up by privileging the anodyne, the uncontroversial, the conventional and the officially approved.
We have to accept the implications of human curiosity. Some of what people say will be wrong. Some of it may even be harmful. But we cannot discover truth without accommodating error. It is the price that we pay for allowing knowledge and understanding to develop and human civilisation to progress.
WRITTEN BYJonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption is an author, medieval historian and former Supreme Court judge
THE “COST OF LIVING CRISIS” = THE GREAT RESET.
By Dave Cullen from Computing Forever. Posted 13th August 2022. Find 17min Video Here:-
Dave mentions some very valid points. I agree with him about the fact we are already in the ‘Great Reset’. The ‘smoke and mirrors’ machines are working overtime to distract the masses.
Drought, drought, wildfires…. don’t turn on that fan Eugene.!
Don’t eat meat, so don’t worry about that disposable BBQ
Don’t shower…use a wet flannel and only flush that toilet once a week…
I’m going to set up a postcode lottery for which UK street gets the first standpipe. 😂 The winner gets a tanker full of water and a large bin to drown the CEO of their failing water company…
The tyranny of Justin Trudeau has finally been exposed – and by two Brits, no less.
By RUPA SUBRAMANYA 12th August 2022. Find Article Here:-
A lawsuit has shown Canada’s travel vaccine mandate had little to do with science and everything to do with politics.
On August 13, 2021, two days before Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called a federal election, his government made a major announcement that “as early as at the end of September” federal government employees would be subject to a vaccine mandate. Further: “no later than the end of October” a vaccine mandate for travellers would also be implemented.
The prime minister’s tough position in the fall of 2021 was a far cry from what he said in March 2021, when Trudeau asserted that every Canadian who wanted to be vaccinated would have a dose available by the fall, implying that it would be voluntary – at a time when Canada was struggling to procure enough vaccine doses and was lagging far behind the UK, US, and other major Western countries in its vaccination campaign.
The vaccine mandate proposal was to become a cornerstone of Trudeau’s re-election bid. Speaking in a suburb of Toronto, home to Canada’s largest, and one of the world’s busiest airports, the prime minister reiterated his government’s intention – presumably if re-elected – to impose vaccine mandates on all sectors under the federal government’s control, which boils down to federal employees and travel.
Trudeau always maintained his government’s Covid policies were based on the science and the latest evidence. Yet, his shifting rhetoric, before and after his election call, tells a different tale. Thanks to a civil lawsuit against the travel mandate by two British immigrants, we’ve now seen inside the guts of part of Trudeau’s Covid machinery, and it’s become abundantly clear that it has little if anything to do with science and everything to do with politics.
From recently released court documents, which I broke in a story for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, show us senior government bureaucrats scrambling to find a scientific rationale for the travel mandate mere days before it was due to come into force. We’ve had the opportunity to see into the inner workings of Trudeau’s vaccine machinery thanks to two British immigrants, Shaun Rickard and Karl Harrison, who filed a civil suit against the Trudeau government in the Federal Court. Thanks to their efforts, and that of their attorney, Sam Presvelos, the affidavits, testimonies, and cross-examination of key government witnesses are now in the public domain.
These documents clearly show us that the bureaucrat charged with holding the pen, under repeated cross-examination, refused to go into details on who ordered the mandate, citing, “Cabinet confidentiality”. Exactly why the rationale for a public health mandate should be so confidential raises the disturbing possibility that there really was no rationale at all. It’s evident that a political decision was taken by Trudeau and his cabinet to go ahead with the mandates, and the hapless bureaucrats were charged with coming up with some rationale, any credible rationale after the fact.
As it happens, the bureaucrat in charge of crafting one of the world’s “strongest vaccination mandates in the world”, according to the bureaucrat herself and Trudeau, has an undergraduate degree in English literature and self-evidently didn’t have the scientific knowledge to take a call. Neither were there any doctors, epidemiologists and scientists on her team, a secretive panel whose membership is nowhere published, and which rates a passing mention on the government’s website.
The federal government’s vaccine mandates were only the icing on the cake on top of provincial vaccine mandates, masking and distancing requirements, and some of the harshest lockdowns in the Western world. Under Canada’s federal system, these fall under provincial jurisdiction, although they certainly had the moral support of Trudeau’s federal government. Canadians, especially the unvaccinated, were virtually prisoners in their own homes and in their own country. Except, of course, unvaccinated Ukrainians, who were allowed to enter Canada after the war started, even when unvaccinated Canadians were barred from travel. Perhaps, if they tried hard enough, someone could come up with a “scientific” rationale for this as well. They might also need to work a bit to find a scientific basis for why, if the vaccine mandate was necessary, it wasn’t imposed before the election, but afterwards.
The five million or so unvaccinated Canadians were, ultimately, pawns in a political chess game. Trudeau cleverly latched onto vaccination, and government mandates flowing from them, as a potent wedge issue in the lead up to the fall 2021 snap election he called. He was hoping to win his Liberal government a majority, which was languishing in a minority position in the House of Commons, having squandered a previous majority thanks to public disgust at corruption and cronyism scams in his government.
As it happened, Trudeau’s gambit didn’t pay off, and his Liberals returned, again, with a minority — although, given the quirks of Canada’s Westminster system, the Conservatives, two elections in a row, won the popular vote, but lost the election. Trudeau now clings on to power in an alliance with the Socialist New Democratic Party and likely won’t face the voters again until 2025.
The tale of Trudeau’s vaccine mandates has ramifications far outside Canada. The world over, governments have invoked draconian powers, heretofore only used in wartime, to control and regulate their people and curtain fundamental individual liberties, such as the right to gather or the right to mobility. Everywhere, people are told by their governments, much as Trudeau told Canadians, we’re so sorry, we hate to restrict your freedoms, but we’re just following the science and the evidence. We know, in the case of Canada’s travel mandate, that this is simply false. In the Canadian case, Trudeau’s ministers have made it clear that the suspended mandates could come back, as, indeed, could Covid-based restrictions the world over.
Thanks to two British immigrants, we now know how the Covid policy sausage is made in Canada, and it isn’t pretty.
Rupa Subramanya is a columnist with the National Post in Canada
The Truth is Where? 
