This episode of the Cyberlaw Podcast kicks off with a spirited debate over AI regulation. Mark MacCarthy dismisses AI researchers’ recent call for attention to the existential risks posed by AI; he thinks it’s a sci-fi distraction from the real issues that need regulation – copyright, privacy, fraud, and competition. I’m utterly flummoxed by the determination on the left to insist that existential threats are not worth discussing, at least while other, more immediate regulatory proposals have not been addressed. Mark and I cross swords about whether anything on his list really needs new, AI-specific regulation when Big Content is already pursuing copyright claims in court, the FTC is already primed to look at AI-enabled fraud and monopolization, and privacy harms are still speculative. Paul Rosenzweig reminds us that we are apparently recapitulating a debate being held behind closed doors in the Biden administration. Paul also points to potentially promising research from OpenAI on reducing AI hallucination.
Gus Hurwitz breaks down the week in FTC news: Amazon has settled an FTC claim over children’s privacy and another over security failings at Amazon’s Ring doorbell operation. The bigger story is the FTC’s effort to impose a commercial death sentence on Meta’s line of children’s advertising and services—for a crime that looks to Gus and me like a misdemeanor. Meta thinks, with some justice, that the FTC is just looking for an excuse to rewrite the 2019 consent decree, something Meta says only a court can do.
Paul is surprised to find even the State Department rising to the defense of section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”).
Finally, Gus asks whether automated tip suggestions should be condemned as “dark patterns” and whether the FTC needs to investigate the New York Times’ stubborn refusal to let him cancel his subscription. He also previews California’s impending Journalism Preservation Act.
You can subscribe to The Cyberlaw Podcast using iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or our RSS feed. As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@gmail.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug! The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of their institutions, clients, friends, families, or pets.
Scheme By California Woman Costs USPS $60 Million In Revenue
A California woman faces up to 10 years in prison over a counterfeit postage scheme that cost the USPS an estimated $60 million.
Lijuan “Angela” Chen was arrested on May 24 after postal inspectors say she shipped nine million parcels over the course of six months using shipping labels belonging to a meter number which had been phased out in 2020, despite indicating that it had been purchased in 2023.
Chen faces one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, and one count of use or possession of counterfeit postage per the filing, Insider reports.
According to an inspector’s affidavit, the USPS would have lost $60 million in revenue due to the apparent scheme.
He also carried out surveillance on a warehouse, watching a delivery truck travel to a USPS facility “where it unloaded twelve large cardboard boxes full of parcels containing counterfeit postage,” per the affidavit.
Other inspectors saw one truck, which had been turned away from a distribution center for trying to ship mail with counterfeit postage, parked outside Chen’s house a day later, according to the court document. -Insider
“The evidence obtained in the investigation shows that Chen is operating a business which provides shipping and postage services to businesses, including e-commerce vendors operating out of China, that seek discounted USPS rates for mailing their products within the United States,” reads the filing.
“Multiple examinations conducted by USPS and USPIS staff have revealed that the vast majority of the postage used by Chen and her business to ship goods within the United States is counterfeit.”
According to prosecutors, Chen’s husband first ran the scheme before traveling to China in 2019, after which she is believed to have continued it up to August 2022.
All of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad…
One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”
It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.
Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.
In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.
“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.
Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.
Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.
Yet what does “white” really mean anymore? Is it an adjective or noun indicating color? Culture? Race? Ethnicity? Is white defined as three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter paleness? Is it an overarching state of mind that encompasses both “Duck Dynasty” and “The West Wing”?
Certainly, in a multiracial, intermarried nation, with 50 million residents not even born in America, the term is a construct that can mean almost anything and thus nothing much at all.
Hispanics are often lumped in with other “marginalized” peoples as part of the vast diversity coalition. Yet most Latinos are indistinguishable from Italian-, Arab-, Greek- or Portuguese-Americans, who, in turn, are all usually considered part of the “white” majority. Does a mere accent mark or trilled “R” transmogrify a blue-eyed Argentinian-American into the preferred nonwhite, diversity collective?
In our crazy racially categorized society, had George Zimmerman just adopted his maternal surname Mesa and Hispanicized George to Jorge, then a “Jorge Mesa” might not have been so easily demonized as what the New York Times slurred as a “white” Hispanic following his deadly confrontation with Trayvon Martin in 2012.
The controversial City University of New York firebrand and graduation speaker Fatima Mousa Mohammed recently railed against capitalism, Zionism, Israel—and, of course, “white supremacy.” Yet she herself is whiter than white. She is now an elite with a law degree. Is she then a beneficiary of “white privilege”? Or do her radical politics trump skin color and earn her exemption?
Is a snarly, divisive Joe Biden, barking at the moon about “ultra-MAGA” and “semi-fascist” white monsters, then, not a purveyor and beneficiary of white supremacy by virtue of his woke politics?
I know a lot of white mechanics, forklift drivers, and assembly workers. I have never heard one employ one of Biden’s racial putdowns like “boy” or “junkie.” Do they enjoy white privilege in some way the Biden family consortium does not—despite Joe’s past fulsome praise of iconic segregationists or his Corn-Pop fables of black youth petting his golden hairs on his sun-tanned white legs, or Hunter’s taboos about dating Asian women?
“The View’s” Sonny Hostin has created a mini-career in imaging all the ways in which she can smear “white” women as demonic (“White women, in particular, want to protect this patriarchy”) as she thinks up new Hitlerian gas metaphors of dehumanization, such as white women resembling “roaches voting for Raid.”
When the media wishes to attack black conservatives like Larry Elder, it now can call them “white supremacists.” When it wishes to warp the news for its woke agendas, it assures us that a Latino mass-murderer was a “white supremacist” and then, in Pavlovian fashion, academics follow with essays assuring us that their “research” proves Hispanics too can be white supremacists.
The creation of false racial identities is an accurate touchstone of perceived collective racialized privilege. “Passing” for white in the racist days of Jim Crow reflected a means of escaping racist segregation and discrimination for blacks.
Now the increasing trend of whites seeking to pass for nonwhites—Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal—reflects a self-interested and careerist assessment that nonwhite status is advantageous.
In college admissions, are applicants more likely to massage a non-white or white identity for perceived advantage? Is the racist ossified “one-drop rule” or “one-sixteenth” genealogy now rebooted as helpful proof of proving white or nonwhite heritage?
Then we come to the absurdity of lumping together 330 million diverse Americans, with ancestries that are often quite antithetical—Serbians and Albanians, Turks and Armenians, Israelis and Syrians, Germans and French. Are all these ancient antagonists reduced now to white automatons of a sinister collective borg?
Arrive as an immigrant from Hungary or Estonia, and—presto!—you are culpable for creating supposed monsters of the past like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, whose statues must be toppled or defaced? Arrive the same day from Oaxaca and you are somehow exempt from such reparatory burdens?
Immigration, at least, is immune from the academic perversion of research, and simply reflects realities on the ground. Millions of immigrants instinctively vote with their feet. We are told the U.S. current population is 67 percent to 70 percent “white” while yearly immigrants, legal and illegal, may total upwards of 90 percent nonwhite.
But how is this paradox possible? Given the loud global warnings about “white rage” and “white supremacy,” why would millions of nonwhites risk their lives to reach a country where they would be assured of being subservient to “white privilege”?
Can it instead be true that they simply do not believe what media and political elites tell them, given they have learned from prior immigrants that far from being at risk, they will have opportunities impossible in their native countries?
Do not new arrivals risk their lives to enter the United States because they rightly assume that a so-called white majority country strangely, unlike their own tribal homelands in China or Mexico, does not fixate on race but instead encourages those who do not look like the majority to join their commonwealth—in a way the Mexican Constitution, for example, traditionally did not?
Class apparently now means nothing. Does the white mechanic in Provo supposedly think like the Pelosi family—as a fellow “white” person?
Are Barack Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “Ultra-MAGAs,” “dregs,” and “chumps” all of the same mentality? Do they share the same values as those embraced by Hunter Biden, Jane Fonda, and Adam Schiff, by virtue of some mystical bonds of whiteness?
Where are the data to support the charge of imperious whiteness? Do so-called raging whites commit hate crimes in numbers greater than their demographics?
In fact, they are underrepresented.
Do purported whites hunt down people of color as if we are all living in 1920s rural Mississippi?
In fact, in relatively rare interracial violent crime, whites are up to 10 times more likely to be victims of black- or Hispanic-perpetrated violence than agents themselves of interracial assault.
Do white supremacists send poor people of color abroad, as often argued, to die in rich white men’s wars?
In fact, white males died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice their numbers in the general population. Is that asymmetry proof of what Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin pontificated about in fixating on white privilege?
How do we adjudicate or define “proportionate representation”? What is disproportionate?
Would it be the more than 70 percent of African Americans in many professional sports at six times their percentages of the population? Or perhaps the current admission statistics of the incoming class at Stanford University, where the university boasts that just 22 percent of its 2026 class is so-called white?
Is it white privilege, rage, or supremacy that explains why seven of the current 25 cabinet and cabinet-level secretaries of the U.S. government are heterosexual white males? Does white privilege reveal why Asian Americans, on average, enjoy an annual median household income some $25,000 higher than their white counterparts?
Are whites, by virtue of their supposed privileged caste, immune from suicide? In fact, the so-called white suicide rate is more than double the rate of blacks and Hispanics.
Do supremacy and privilege explain why two-thirds of the annual opioid overdose deaths are among whites?
Perhaps to substantiate the boilerplate of “white supremacy” and “white rage,” we might look to efforts at retro-segregation?
Are privileged whites insisting on white-only college graduations? Perhaps they are demanding set-aside spaces on campuses, where they feel “safer” and can enjoy racial affinities and solidarity by excluding others? In fact, there are racially segregated spaces on campuses, but they tend to exclude whites.
Perhaps the Left means white supremacy is a euphemism for a return to segregated housing and redlined neighborhoods. In fact, there are racially segregated dorms on campuses, the so-called “theme houses,” but again these were demanded by nonwhites.
We are told that it is not safe for the diverse to be around white people, given their supposed violent proclivities. But that certainly seems not to be the case for our elites. The Obamas often lecture the country on housing discrimination and the historic efforts of whites to self-congregate and exclude. But the ex-president owns four expensive homes, in Kalorama D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, Hawaii, and Chicago. Yet he is least likely to reside in his richly diverse Chicago neighborhood and apparently feels more at home with the mostly white neighbors of his other three estates.
Indeed, some of the most severe critics of “white privilege” and “white rage” are themselves ensconced in white neighborhoods, such as the Duchess of Sussex or LeBron James. When Oprah Winfrey damns white supremacy in graduation speeches, is her subtext a snarl at her fellow billionaire neighbors in Montecito?
So what is going on with the contemporary fixation on white, white, white?
Why are there so many Duke Lacrosse, Covington kids, Tawana Brawley, and Jussie Smollett cases, as if the dearth of white oppressors and the multitude of would-be oppressed requires the fabrication of so-called white hate crimes?
Why does Joe Biden lecture the country on its supposedly greatest terrorist threat of “white supremacy”—this from the most racialist president of the modern era, who sets himself up as the judge of who is and who “ain’t black”?
This rebooted white collective stereotype seems to be the obsession of two general groups. One cadre is the elite professional, left-wing whites. By any definition of income and status, its members are quite blessed and privileged. For them, voicing the new white pejorative is a sort of psychological mechanism that excuses their own guilt-ridden privilege, by fobbing purported toxic “whiteness” onto an amorphous “semi-fascist” other, while virtue signaling they are not like “them.”
“Them,” of course, are those who live and work in places like East Palestine, Ohio, and who have zero privilege but, by the Obama-Clinton-Biden standards, are culturally and socially deplorable.
Such “white rage” and “white supremacist” mantras are also careerist cues that signal, as with party membership of the old Soviet nomenklatura, that they are correct and now audited for raises, promotions, and rewards.
The second group is composed of the wealthy, left-wing minority elites in politics, media, entertainment, sports, and government service. For the Al Sharptons and “squad” members of the world, damning “white, white, white” bogeymen alleviates them of any painful analysis of inequality, such as the role of endemic illegitimacy and absent fathers in nearly ensuring a lack of parity. It is hard work to buck the teachers’ unions and set up K-12 charter schools in the inner city that focus on math, science, and languages to ensure parity. But it is easy and cheap—and far more lucrative—to blast the SAT test as “racist” and demand reparative admissions to Yale or Harvard.
For the racialist careerist, the less racism there is to find, all the more essential it is to root it out somehow, somewhere. So, here arrives a new genre of manufactured hate crimes, whose logic is “even if it did not happen, it reminds us that it could have happened.”
The dearth of actual racism also demands a new set of adjectives that serve as something like sophisticated detectors to discover otherwise invisible natural gas fumes. The adjective “systemic” means only the select can now spot racism. Like air, it is everywhere but invisible and thus requires battalions of diversity, equity, and inclusion inspectors to use their training to expose it in the common atmosphere.
“Microaggressions” exist as a tacit admission there are no aggressions as we commonly define them. No matter—there are still hints that there might be some racial aggression, once experts redefine words and gestures to ferret out micro-racists in our midst.
Where does this all lead?
We are wasting trillions of dollars in capital, labor, and time in tribal cannibalism as our friends abroad watch in horror, and our enemies savor our decline into collective suicide—while we sink into debt, our cities turn medieval, our border disappears, our criminal justice system collapses, and our military chases its tail.
We know from history the ultimate destination of tribal chauvinism, and it is not pretty. Once a society retribalizes, it descends into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Everyone eventually seeks out or manufactures a tribal identity for self-protection. Tribalism operates on the principles of proliferation: if a neighboring nation goes nuclear, then everyone in the neighborhood must too.
Unless some passengers on our runaway train force our engineers to hit the brakes, we are headed over the cliff into Yugoslavia.
In this week’s TheReason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman attempt to disentangle the various roiling debates over sexuality, identity, and the state amid this year’s Pride month celebrations.
0:25: Pride wars
31:10: Weekly Listener Question
43:15: California Assembly votes to pass Journalism Preservation Act
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
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US Refuses To Release Over 8,000 Hours Of Jan. 6 Security Footage: Court Filing
The Biden DOJ is refusing to release over 8,000 hours of US Capitol security footage from January 6, 2001 spanning noon to 8pm, leaving criminal defendants unable to use over 60% of the footage turned over to the FBI, according to a federal court filing.
In the June 1 filing, Topeka, KS resident William A. Pope told US District Judge Rudolph Contreras that the DOJ has given Jan. 6 defendants less than 6,000 hours of footage from 650 cameras.
Pope is defending himself against eight federal charges following his presence on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, and has been attempting to obtain said footage and other evidence that could be exculpatory in his case.
Pope said that after getting access to U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) closed-circuit television video through a House GOP committee, he discovered some security cameras were missing footage from 2–6 p.m. on Jan. 6.
The system held by Congress includes as much as 462,000 hours of security video from more than 1,700 cameras from Dec. 27, 2020, through Jan. 7, 2021, he said.
The cameras are located throughout the Capitol Building interior, the Capitol Visitor Center, Senate and House office buildings, Capitol tunnels and subways, on the grounds outside, affixed to building exteriors and along various streets near the Capitol. –Epoch Times
In his filing, Pope has asked Contreras to compel the Biden DOJ to provide an inventory of USCP cameras and CCTV footage.
“This is an issue because the government has previously withheld highly relevant CCTV cameras from discovery, only to announce later that they had suddenly discovered more cameras in their possession,” wrote Pope.
The Capitol Police, meanwhile, said via general counsel Thomas DiBiase, that the USCP has turned over “more than 14,000 hours) of CCTV footage to the FBI for the period in question.
According to Pope, “If the government does not even know what they have, the government is likely denying hundreds of January 6 defendants important exculpatory evidence,” adding “This would be like the government sending an innocent man to death row because they were too lazy to test for the DNA that would exonerate him.
“This potential for depriving citizens of their liberties without due process makes it even more crucial for this court to compel the government to inventory all Capitol Police CCTV in their possession, and to produce it in discovery,” Pope continued.
In a filing opposing Pope’s demand, Assistant US Attorney Kelly E. Moran wrote; “It is unclear to the government how disclosing more discovery to criminal defendants than the government was required by law to provide constitutes a potential Brady [exculpatory evidence] violation,” adding “The government does not have a ‘full inventory’ of ‘all Capitol Police CCTV they have possessed,’ and the defendant provides no support for his claim that the government should be compelled to create such an inventory.”
For those following the Bud Light fiasco, one would expect a quick and dramatic turnaround to save the brand and the whole company from oblivion. It has faced a consumer backlash for the ages, one that has even driven the company to buy back its own product.
Retailers stuck with surpluses are nearly giving it away for free. And yet, in most places in the country, you can see the stuff stacked high on the shelves plastered with on-sale tags.
But such turnarounds aren’t so easy. In the midst of a real calamity, the beer announced for Pride Month a new partnership and $200,000 grant to “the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), the exclusive certifying body for LGBT-owned businesses … to continue supporting economic opportunities and advancements for LGBTQ+ Americans and business owners across the country.”
And then offered a big logo to reinforce this:
What the heck are they thinking? It’s beyond bizarre. It’s not just a lack of cultural fit with their main consumers. It’s worse than that. The whole country is right now in the midst of a real reckoning with the fundamental biological reality of two sexes. And people have also discovered that in recent years, particularly during pandemic lockdown times, a portion of the medical community, in cooperation with major swaths of the public health sector, has assisted and encouraged gender dysphoria in young people and facilitated bodily mutilation.
This cause has absolutely nothing to do with civil rights as we once regarded them. It’s not about equality or equal freedom. It’s about the imposition of myths and lies over basic bourgeois sensibilities and science. For many people, this is where the line is drawn. It deals with core principles that can never be given away lest civilization itself slips into nothingness.
And yet we have major parts of corporate America pretending as if this were nothing but an extension of the emancipationist campaigns of the past. It’s preposterous. So why are they doing this, even in the face of devastating sales losses, consumer boycotts, and mainstream outrage that poses an existential threat to the market share of companies like Anheuser-Busch, Target, Sports Illustrated, Glamour, North Face, and Kohl’s? Maybe they figured that all of this would blow over. But it hasn’t. And it won’t.
There’s a major reckoning taking place. Consumers are in charge and asserting their rights under the system of capitalism to be the ones ultimately in charge of what companies and products live or die.
Let’s consider three major factors to provide a full explanation.
First, during the lockdowns, a major consolidation of large companies took hold of most economic sectors. Small businesses with a close connection to their customer bases were forcibly shuttered and millions never recovered. Meanwhile, large companies were allowed to stay open, allowing them to drain capital and labor from decentralized businesses into centralized ones.
Centralized and consolidated industrial structures are typically more easily controlled by government and better positioned to exercise control of government through regulatory capture. This problem has vexed capitalistic economies for more than 150 years, of course, beginning with railroads and extending to munitions manufacturers and the medical industry by the mid-20th century. But in the 21st century, it has also hit the retail sector and invaded the whole of our lives.
Just consider a company called Authentic Brands. It vastly expanded its holdings in the past four years, beginning with Sports Illustrated in 2019, the magazine that features trans athletes on its covers now. In the same year, BlackRock became the largest shareholder. During the lockdowns, the company started gobbling up far more: Brooks Brothers, Izod, Van Heusen, Arrow, Geoffrey Beene, Reebok, Adidas, Billabong, Roxy, DC Shoes, and Honolua among its 50 brands.
The same is true for food and has been going on for 35 years, a trend made worse during the lockdowns, when small suppliers saw their chains of production disrupted and large players made a killing. A small number of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80 percent of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans.
Four firms or fewer control at least 50 percent of the market for 79 percent of groceries. For almost a third of shopping items, the top firms control at least 75 percent of the market share.
Second, the financing of these companies is hugely influential over their marketing policies. Companies such as BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard (which together manage $20 trillion in capital) have a major client in state pension holdings and face massive political pressure from lawmakers in blue states to push CEI/DEI/ESG policies. Responding to political pressure, they cobbled together indexes to rank the companies and make investments contingent on meeting political goals. The large companies are heavily leveraged—this began in 2000 with zero-interest-rate policies—and must comply with them or face financial trouble, the consumer be damned.
So a company such as Target or Bud Light might know for sure that their offensive marketing will massively annoy their consumer base, but they take that risk to please their major stockholders of these centralized financial firms, without whom they’re toast. They believe that they’re making a rational trade-off: some small changes in consumer demand in exchange for financial largess from their major benefactors.
This tension is a serious problem, a real tug-of-war between regular people and ruling-class elites.
Third, these companies are just stupid. There’s no other way to put it. They’re refusing to read the writing on the wall.
It happens often in corporate history. I strongly encourage you to watch the 2023 film “Blackberry.” The company that created the modern smartphone held 40 percent of the global market until 2007, when the iPhone was announced. It was clearly a better product but the executives at Blackberry couldn’t see or admit it. They were so attached to their existing product and drunk on money and power that they couldn’t adapt, even in the face of impending disaster.
Much of corporate America today is like Blackberry in 2007, pretending that the consumer revolt will go away and that things will get back to normal. This might be a gigantic error. It’s different this time. Consumers have awakened to the racket.
The strongest evidence is Bud Light, but the revolution is escalating and extending and hitting brands that were once beloved but now are clearly in bed with ruling-class elites. These companies proved useless in defending commercial rights during the lockdowns and now want to shove anti-scientific political symbolism down all our throats. They might not get away with it this time.
The beauty of the film “Blackberry” is that it shows that even the most powerful and well-financed companies can make horrible market decisions. What’s more, any normal person could have told the executives that they were on the wrong path, but money, pride, fame, and a record of success can completely blind companies to their failures and their long-term self-interest.
This appears to be happening across the commercial space, as more and more consumers are realizing their power and are determined to reassert their influence. It’s certainly in their power to do so. The fix for this is authentic capitalism and a dismantling of the corporatist structures that dominate our lives today.
“We Are Not Alone”: US Has Retrieved Craft Of ‘Non-Human Origin’ Says Whistleblower From Govt. Task Force On UFOs
A new report from two veteran (mainstream) journalists citing a decorated whistleblower provides stunning insight into the US Government’s history with UFOs.
For those who ‘want to believe’ – short of a UFO landing on the lawn of the White House, this is it.
For those who think the recent government UFO disclosures are one big psyop, this is it.
Jumping right in…
A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin. -The Debrief
The whistleblower, 36-year-old David Charles Grusch, is a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan who went on to work at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Ageny (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – where he served as the latter’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. Then from late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force, which was established to investigate UFOs – which are now officially called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. It was launched the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and has since been reorganized into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which includes investigations of objects which operate underwater.
Grusch, a whistleblower now represented by an attorney who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), spoke with journalists Leslie Kean (cousin of GOP Sen. Tom Kean Jr. of NJ) who co-authored a 2017 piece in the NY Times revealing that the DoD spent $22.5 million on a secret program to investigate UFOs, and Ralph Blumenthal, a veteran NY Times reporter.
Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record. -The Debrief
According to the The Debrief;
The recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors.
“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” said Grusch. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.“
According to analysis, the objects are “of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.”
UFO “legacy programs” have long been concealed within “multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional secret access programs without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.”
Gorsuch told Congress of the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”
[M]aterials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs (the classified locations, names and other specific data of which were provided to the Inspector General and intel committee staff).
According to an unclassified version of his whistleblower complaint, Grusch has direct knowledge that UAP-related classified information has been withheld and/or concealed from Congress by “elements” of the intelligence community “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program.”
“A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin,” said Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey continued. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”
NASIC, headquartered at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, is the Department of Defense’s primary Air Force source for foreign air and space threat analysis. Its mission is to “discover and characterize air, space, missile, and cyber threats,” according to the agency’s website. “The center’s team of trusted subject matter experts deliver unique collection, exploitation, and analytic capabilities not found elsewhere,” the website states.
Grey said that such immense capabilities are not merely relegated to the study of the prosaic. “The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early 20th century, should no longer remain a secret,” he said. “The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage.” -The Debrief
“A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered,” said Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
“However, it is a delicate matter getting this potentially explosive information into the right hands for validation. This is made harder by the fact that, rightly or wrongly, a number of potential sources do not trust the leadership of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office established by Congress.”
According to Grusch, it’s dangerous for this “eighty-year arms race” to continue in secret because it “further inhibits the world populace to be prepared for an unexpected, non-human intelligence contact scenario.”
“I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically and provides a generally uniting issue for nations of the world to re-assess their priorities.”
There’s a lot more in the report. We recommend hopping over and reading it in its entirety here…
If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets.
The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began.
That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why and how it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.
Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.
Here are 15 of those factors.
1. Media ownership.
The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned and controlled by plutocrats whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 from the also-immensely-wealthy Graham family. The New York Times has been run by the same family for over a century. Rupert Murdoch owns a vast international media empire whose success is largely owed to the US government agencies with whom he is closely intertwined. Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth — “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it.
Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet. Rupert Murdoch never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re a flag-burning anti-imperialist.
Which takes us to another related point:
2. “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.
“How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-”
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”
3. Journalists learn pro-establishment groupthink without being told.
This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.
During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders enraged the mass media with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him. Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted that WaPo had published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.
Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment with The Hill’s online show Rising.
“There are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in the segment. “So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” said Enjeti. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen published an article in Salon titled “Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias” in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:
“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”
Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect, publishing an article with Rolling Stone about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:
“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.
4. Mass media employees who don’t comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out.
Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War
“And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”https://t.co/W4mpgxDQP0
Journalists either learn how to do the kind of reporting that will advance their careers in the mass media, or they don’t learn and they either remain marginalized and unheard of or they get worn down and quit. NBC reporter William Arkin resigned from the network in 2019, criticizing NBC in an open letter for being consistently “in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war,” and complaining that the network had begun “emulating the national security state itself.”
Arkin said he often found himself a “lone voice” in scrutinizing various aspects of the US war machine, saying he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.”
“We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story,” Arkin wrote. “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
Sometimes the pressure is much less subtle. Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges left The New York Times after being issued a formal written reprimand by the paper for criticizing the Iraq invasion in a speech at Rockford College, realizing that he would either have to stop speaking publicly about what he believed or he’d be fired.
“Either I muzzled myself to pay fealty to my career… or I spoke out and realized that my relationship with my employer was terminal,” Hedges said in 2013. “And so at that point I left before they got rid of me. But I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to be able to stay.”
5. Mass media employees who step too far out of line get fired.
Last week, CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill delivered a speech at the United Nations in support of Palestinian self-determination and equal rights. Less than 24 hours later, CNN was done with him. https://t.co/yUjw97fUb2
This measure doesn’t need to be applied often but happens enough for people with careers in media to get the message, like when Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for his opposition to the Bush administration’s warmongering in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion despite having the best ratings of any show on the network, or in 2018 when Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for supporting freedom for Palestinians during a speech at the United Nations.
6. Mass media employees who toe the imperial line see their careers advance.
If you’re curious why NBC’s Richard Engel is so upset about the US withdrawing from Afghanistan, he talks honestly in his book War Journal about how he knew the Iraq War was going to be great for the careers of people like him https://t.co/0KXEOCNuKLpic.twitter.com/yUGCVQwFxu
In his 2008 book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC’s Richard Engel wrote that he did everything he could to get into Iraq because he knew it would provide a massive boost to his career, calling his presence there during the war his “big break”.
“In the run-up to the war, it was clear that Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” Engels wrote. “I sneaked into Iraq before the war because I thought the conflict would be the turning point in the Middle East, where I had already been living for seven years. As a young freelancer, I believed some reporters would die covering the Iraq war, and that others would make a name for themselves.”
This gives a lot of insight into the way ambitious journalists think about climbing the career ladder in their field, and also into one reason why those types are so gung-ho about war all the time. If you know a war can advance your career, you’re going to hope it happens and do everything you can to facilitate it. The whole system is set up to elevate the absolute worst sort of people.
7. With public and state-funded media, the influence is more overt.
Of course NPR is US state-affiliated media. It’s funded by the US government, all its reporting advances the information interests of the US government, and its CEO’s last job was running overt propaganda organs of the US government. If it doesn’t deserve that label, no one does. pic.twitter.com/AXWAYwpYcm
So we’ve been talking about the pressures that are brought to bear on mass media employees in the plutocrat-run media, but what about mass media that aren’t owned by plutocrats, like NPR and the BBC?
Well, propaganda thrives in those institutions for more obvious reasons: their proximity to government powers. Right up into the 1990s the BBC was just letting MI5 outright vet its employees for “subversive” political activity, and only officially changed that policy when they got caught. NPR’s CEO John Lansing came directly out of the US government’s official propaganda services, having previously served as the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media — and he was not the first NPR executive with an extensive background in the US state propaganda apparatus.
With US government-owned outlets like Voice of America the control is even more overt than that. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:
I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, US government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.
8. Access journalism.
Every time I watch a town hall like last night’s, I’m blown away with how everyday people ask such better questions than professional journalists
Access journalism is my profession’s greatest curse. Too many reporters fear getting cut off for one tough Q. Real people don’t care
Krystal Ball touched on this one in her anecdote about MSNBC’s influential call from the Clinton camp above. Access journalism refers to the way media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures don’t perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic. If someone in power decides they don’t like a given reporter they can simply decide to give their interviews to someone else who’s sufficiently sycophantic, or call on someone else at the press conference, or have conversations on and off the record with someone who kisses up to them a bit more.
Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.
9. Getting fed “scoops” by government agencies looking to advance their information interests.
“A US official told CNN” is not a “Scoop” but demonstrates the willingness of ‘journalists’ to stenograph unverifiable government disinformation. https://t.co/wr2u3xKtiI
In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
One of the easiest ways to break a major story on national security or foreign policy these days is to get entrusted with a “scoop” by one or more government officials — on condition of anonymity of course — which just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting. But it’s a practice that’s becoming more and more common in western “journalism” as the need to distribute propaganda about Washington’s cold war enemies in Moscow and Beijing increases.
Some notorious recent examples of this are The New York Times’ completely discredited report that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US and allied forces in Afghanistan, and The Guardian’s completely discredited report that Paul Manafort paid visits to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. Both were simply falsehoods that the mass media were fed by intelligence operatives who were trying to seed a narrative in the public consciousness, which they then repeated as fact without ever disclosing the names of those who fed them the false story. Another related example is US officials admitting to NBC last year — again under cover of anonymity — that the Biden administration had simply been feeding lies about Russia to the media in order to win an “information war” against Putin.
This dynamic is similar to the one in access journalism in that outlets and reporters who’ve proven themselves sympathetic and uncritical parrots of the government narratives they are fed are the ones most likely to be fed them, and therefore the ones to get the “scoop”. We caught a whiff of what this looks like from the inside when acting CIA director under the Obama administration Mike Morell testified that he and his intelligence cartel cohorts had initially planned to seed their disinfo op about the Hunter Biden laptop to a particular unnamed reporter at The Washington Post, whom they presumably had a good working relationship with.
Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed”. Nothing about the story was verified as true in any way; it was just the same story being told by the same source to different people.
10. Class interests.
Rachel Maddow, as a reward for feeding liberals demented conspiracies, was just rewarded by Comcast with a contract for $30m/year: $2.5 million/month.
Yet few journalists object or call her a “grifter”. Why? Because she works for a huge corporation, so they see it as legitimate. pic.twitter.com/qKpjIViknf
The more a mass media employee goes along with the imperial groupthink, follows the unwritten rules and remains unthreatening to the powerful, the higher up the media career ladder they will climb. The higher up the career ladder they climb, the more money they will often find themselves making. Once they find themselves in a position to influence a very large number of people, they are a part of a wealthy class which has a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo which lets them keep their fortune.
This can take the form of opposing anything resembling socialism or political movements that might make the rich pay more taxes, as we saw in the virulent smear campaigns against progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won’t start fighting a class war. It can also take the form of making one more supportive of the empire more generally, because that’s the status quo your fortune is built on. It can also take the form of making one more sympathetic to politicians, government officials, plutocrats and celebrities as a whole, because that class is who your friends are now; that’s who you’re hanging out with, going to the parties and the weddings of, drinking with, laughing with, schmoozing with.
Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.
The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013. If your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a propagandist for the imperial establishment in the ways we’ve been discussing.
Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.
The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.
“Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues,” writes Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman. “But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.”
This is journalistic malpractice. It is never, ever in accord with journalistic ethics to cite war profiteer-funded think tanks on matters of war, militarism or foreign relations, but the western press do it constantly, without even disclosing this immense conflict of interest to their audience.
Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world or what have you. But in reality there’s only one story to be found in such citations: “War Industry Supports More War.”
The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.
12. The Council on Foreign Relations.
Swiss Propaganda Research: “Executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations” #CFR#Bilderberg#TrilateralCommission (Click on link, then click to enlarge)
It should probably also be noted here that the Council on Foreign Relations is a profoundly influential think tank which counts a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists among its membership, a dynamic which gives think tanks another layer of influence in the media.
In 1993 former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood approvingly described CFR as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
Harwood writes:
The membership of these journalists in the council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. Their influence, Jon Vanden Heuvel speculates in an article in the Media Studies Journal, is likely to increase now that the Cold War has ended: “By focusing on particular crises around the world {the media are in a better position} to pressure government to act.”
13. Advertising.
Politico is erasing evidence of their sponsorship from Lockheed Martin but won’t answer questions about whether their Sunday puff piece about Lockheed’s Skunk Works was advertorial or editorial content.
In 2021 Politico was caught publishing fawning apologia for top weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin at the same time Lockheed was sponsoring a Politico newsletter on foreign policy. Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton wrote at the time:
There’s a very blurry line between Politico’s financial relationship with the largest weapons firm in the United States, Lockheed Martin, and its editorial output. And that line may have just become even more opaque.
Last week, Responsible Statecraft’s Ethan Paul reported that Politico was scrubbing its archives of any reference to Lockheed Martin’s longtime sponsorship of the publication’s popular newsletter, Morning Defense. While evidence of Lockheed’s financial relationship with Politico was erased, the popular beltway outlet just published a remarkable puff piece about the company, with no acknowledgement of the longstanding financial relationship with Politico.
Politico didn’t respond to questions about whether Lockheed was an ongoing sponsor of the publication after last month when it scrubbed the defense giant’s ads or whether the weapons firm paid for what read largely-like an advertorial.
Politico’s Lee Hudson visited Lockheed’s highly secure, and mostly classified, Skunk Works research and development facility north of Los Angeles and glowingly wrote, “For defense tech journalists and aviation nerds, this is the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory, but think supersonic drones instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
Ever wondered why you’ll see things like ads for Northrop Grumman during the Superbowl? Do you think anyone’s watching that ad saying “You know what? I’m gonna buy myself a stealth bomber”? Of course not. The defense industry advertises in media all the time, and while it might not always get caught red-handed in blatant manipulation of news publications like Lockheed did with Politico, it’s hard to imagine that their money wouldn’t have a chilling effect on foreign policy reporting, and perhaps even give them some pull on editorial matters.
Like Jeff Cohen said above: the top advertisers are off limits.
14. Covert infiltration.
CIA’s “mop up man” Ken Dilanian is the NBC ‘reporter’ used to channel claim about president Putin + US election https://t.co/GOci4EWwdv
Just because a lot of the mass media’s propagandistic behavior can be explained without secret conspiracies doesn’t mean secret conspiracies aren’t happening. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.
We are told that this sort of covert infiltration doesn’t happen anymore today, but that’s absurd. Of course it does. People believe the CIA no longer engages in nefarious behavior because they find it comfortable to believe that, not because there is any evidentiary basis for that belief.
There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.
And indeed we have seen evidence that it happens today. Back in 2014 Ken Dilanian, now a prominent reporter for NBC, was caught intimately collaborating with the CIA in his reporting and sending them articles for approval and changes before publication. In his emails with CIA press handlers Dilanian is seen acting like a propagandist for the agency, talking about how he intended an article about CIA drone strikes to be “reassuring to the public” and editing his reporting in accordance with their wishes.
Lastly, sometimes the mass media act like state propagandists because they are actual state propagandists. Back in Carl Bernstein’s day the CIA had to secretly infiltrate the mass media; nowadays the mass media openly hire intelligence insiders to work among their ranks. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona.
The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience. Last year Lever News published a report on the way the media had been bringing on US empire managers who are currently working for war profiteer companies as part of their life in the DC swamp’s revolving door between the public and private sector and presenting them as impartial pundits on the war in Ukraine.
So as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level which push them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the western mass media act like PR agents for the western empire and its component parts: because that’s exactly what they are.
* * *
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Child welfare agents in New York may soon have to tell parents their rights before attempting a home search. However, while this parental rights legislation has passed with broad support in the New York State Assembly, New York City’s child welfare agency has been lobbying to weaken it.
Over the past several months, at least one other statehouse has been advancing legislation designed to curb the power of child welfare agents to coerce in-home searches. Just last month, the Texas Legislature passed sweeping legislation which requires child welfare agents to inform parents of their rights, including the right to deny a warrantless home search, when the agency begins an investigation of abuse or neglect against a family.
Similar legislation is now looking to pass in New York. Last month, the State Assembly’s Committee on Children and Families unanimously passed a billthat would require the state’s child welfare agents to inform parents of their existing legal rights at the initial point of contact when investigating an allegation of child abuse or neglect, including parents’ rights to speak to an attorney, refuse a warrantless home search, and refuse drug tests. The bill also requires child welfare agents to inform parents of the allegations against them.
However, according to a recent report from ProPublica, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the city’s child welfare agency, has been privately pressuring lawmakers to weaken the bill—all while publicly supporting the measure.
According to eight lawmakers, staffers, and lobbyists interviewed by ProPublica, ACS has sent state Senate leadership new versions of the bill “that would have removed mention of several of the rights,” including the requirement that child welfare agents inform parents that what they say can be used against them and that they can refuse body searches of their children that haven’t been approved by a judge. Interviewees also alleged that ACS even lobbied to remove the word “rights” from the bill altogether.
An ACS spokesperson did not deny to ProPublica that the agency lobbied to remove references to “rights” in the measure and further added that it would be “a major and important change to the law” to tell parents of their right to deny ACS entry and talk to an attorney.
But ACS claims to support the bill. The spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “has been supportive of legislation that would require child protective specialists to provide oral and written information to parents, about their rights, at the initial point of contact,” but added that the bill needs to allow “child welfare agencies to assess the safety of children who have been reported as possibly abused or neglected.” Notably, the bill does include a carve-out allowing child welfare agents to “take all lawful measures necessary to protect the child’s life or health prior to disseminating information regarding the parent or caretaker’s rights” in circumstances where the agent has “reasonable cause to believe that exigent circumstances exist that present an imminent danger to the child’s life or health and there is no time to seek a court order.”
According to ProPublica, despite the popularity of the bill in committee, it’s unclear whether it will actually get a vote in the state Senate, as the Senate’s majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D–Yonkers), has blocked the measure multiple times.
It’s hardly surprising that ACS would pressure state lawmakers to neuter a bill requiring them to actually inform parents of their legal rights. According to a ProPublica investigation published last year, ACS workers have a habit of pressuring parents to submit to warrantless home searches, often implying that, unless they submit to the search, their children will be seized.
Further, one 2021 study estimated that, in New York City, around 1 in 3 children are the subject of a child welfare investigation by the time they turn 18—a number that rises to over 40 percent for black children. Nationwide, while thousands of families are subject to invasive investigations each year, a 2019 review found that only 16 percent of investigations found a “substantiated” incident of child abuse or neglect.
Mark and Carol Brault, who own 114 acres of forested land in Hartland, Connecticut, operate a private nature preserve that charges admission to visitors interested in seeing bears and other wildlife. In a 2020 lawsuit, the town of Hartland accused Mark Brault of violating a local ordinance against feeding bears, a charge that he denies. The latest wrinkle in that ongoing dispute involves the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), which the Braults say has defied the Fourth Amendment by attaching a camera to a black bear that is known to frequent their property.
“Turning wildlife into unguided surveillance drones is unbearable,” Institute for Justice (I.J.) senior attorney Robert Frommer, a Fourth Amendment specialist who is not involved in this case, writes in an email. “Connecticut should paws its animal camera program so as not to infringe on Nutmeggers’ privacy and security.”
DEEP’s bear-borne camera is a twist on longstanding warrantless surveillance of private property by wildlife agents, which I.J. has challenged as a violation of state constitutional protections in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In a complaint that the Braults filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, they argue that DEEP’s deployment of an ursine spy, identified by a state tag as Bear Number 119, violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.
The Braults are seeking an injunction ordering DEEP to “remove and disable the cameras from all tagged bears within ten miles of the plaintiffs’ residence, to destroy all photographic evidence gathered by the aforesaid surveillance, and to cease and desist from conducting such warrantless surveillance in the future.” But for reasons that Reason‘s Joe Lancaster explained last year, their claim looks iffy under the U.S. Supreme Court’s “open fields” doctrine.
Sometime between January 1 and May 20, according to the Braults’ complaint, DEEP “affixed a collar to Bear Number 119 which contained a camera.” On May 20, “Bear Number 119 approached to within 200 yards of the plaintiffs’ residence, which is located near the center of their property.” The bear “was wearing the aforesaid camera at the time and, upon information and belief, that camera was activated and taking and transmitting pictures or video of the interior of the plaintiffs’ property to the defendant.”
Mark Brault “noticed that the bear now had not just an ear tag but a collar, and so he got on his camera and zoomed in on the bear, and not only did it have a collar, but the collar had a camera on it,” John R. Williams, Brault’s attorney, toldCT Insider. “That’s a bear that the DEEP knows is a frequenter of the property. So what does that say to me? That says to me that they’re engaging in a warrantless search of his property.”
The Braults say DEEP “did not have a search warrant authorizing or permitting photographic surveillance of the interior of the property of the plaintiffs.” Presumably the bear did not have a search warrant either.
In an accompanying affidavit, Mark Brault notes that the property is “clearly posted with ‘no trespassing’ signs.” But according to the Supreme Court, the fact that the Braults own the property and had posted signs to that effect does not matter under the Fourth Amendment.
“The special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the Court in the 1924 case Hester v. United States, which involved illegal whiskey production. “The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law.”
The Court reaffirmed that principle in the 1984 case Oliver v. United States, which involved a marijuana farm discovered by Kentucky state police. “In the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. Although the marijuana growers “erected fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs around the property,” the Court rejected “the suggestion that steps taken to protect privacy establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate.”
The implication was that “open fields” need not actually be open. Even when private property is fenced and marked with “No Trespassing” signs, the Court said, “no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields.” At the same time, it acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment does apply to the area “immediately adjacent to the home,” known as the “curtilage.”
That distinction could provide an opening for the Braults, since they say the camera-carrying bear “approached to within 200 yards” of their home. The bear, unschooled in the fine points of Fourth Amendment case law, might well meander onto a portion of the property that courts would recognize as curtilage.
In that respect, the camera carried by Bear Number 119 is different from the fixed cameras that wildlife agents have posted on private property in states such as Pennsylvania and Tennessee. If the bear has entered or might enter the curtilage around the Braults’ home, that could be constitutionally significant even under current precedents.
I.J. argues that the open fields doctrine is misbegotten. It says the “distinction” that Justice Holmes deemed “as old as the common law” in Hester was based on a misunderstanding.
“The sole citation to support this historical assertion was to three pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Frommer and fellow I.J. attorney Anthony Sanders noted in a 2017 Supreme Court brief. “The problem with Justice Holmes’ citation is that in those pages, Blackstone was not talking about open fields, officers of the law, or even trespass. Instead, he was discussing the elements of burglary. Blackstone simply lays out the rule that to commit burglary, among other elements, the burglar must break into a home, and do it at night.”
The Supreme Court “took this distinction between burglary and other crimes and gave it constitutional significance by applying it to an area—an open field—that
Blackstone does not even address,” Frommer and Sanders added. “By the same, ill-founded reasoning, Hester could have stated that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the government entering homes during the day, or entering buildings such as barns and warehouses at all, all areas Blackstone contrasted to a break-in of the home at night….That is the logical conclusion once the citation to Blackstone is actually examined. In short, the citation to Blackstone did nothing to support the Court’s refusal to apply the Fourth Amendment to an ‘open field.'”
But given the persistence of this mistaken doctrine, Frommer says, “there likely isn’t a viable Fourth Amendment claim” against DEEP’s use of bear-borne cameras. And although “Connecticut’s constitution protects ‘possessions,’ which we believe includes private land,” he says, the Connecticut Supreme Court “recently rejected a challenge to the open fields doctrine under the state constitution.”
Frommer thinks the best bet for a Fourth Amendment claim in this case would emphasize the unpredictable paths of camera-carrying bears. “The problem with slapping a camera onto a bear and then unleashing it into the wild is that you can’t control where that bear goes,” he writes. “For all the officer knows, the bear could park itself right outside somebody’s house, with the camera capturing everything therein.”
As Frommer sees it, “What officials did here should count as a ‘search’ upon a straightforward understanding of the term, which is just a purposeful investigative act. And this tactic seems unreasonable given the potential breadth of what the camera would expose, not just as to the couple, but for other people and homes it may come across. I don’t know if that’s a winning argument, but it’s what I would contend if I were in their shoes.”
