COIN+TELPRO was a series of illegal operations conducted by the FBI between 1956-1971, to disrupt, discredit and neutralise anyone considered a threat to national security, including members of the Women’s Liberation Movement and even the Boy Scouts of America.
And it wasn’t just the customary wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation, the FBI committed blackmail and murder.
In the 1960’s a Washington Post expose by army intelligence whistle-blower, Christopher Pyle, revealed a massive surveillance operation run by the Army, called CONUS Intel. It involved thousands of undercover military agents infiltrating and spying on virtually everybody active on what they deemed ‘civil disturbances.’ It turns out, many of those targeted had done nothing even remotely subversive, unless you consider attending a left-wing college presentation or church meeting, revolutionary.
These programs came to a head in the 1970’s, when an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the CIA. As if predicting the internet as an instrument for mass surveillance, Senator Frank Church warned that the NSA’s capabilities could “at any time could be turned around on the American people.”
USAGM
Before the internet, the deployment of PSYOPS was limited to legacy media and permitted only on foreign soil. But that all changed in 2013, when the government granted themselves permission to target ordinary Americans.
Conceived at the end of the cold war as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, USAGM is a lesser-known government agency charged with broadcasting thousands of weekly hours of US propaganda to foreign audiences, that has played a major role in pushing pro-American stories to former Soviet Bloc countries ever since Perestroika.
For decades an anti-propaganda law, known as the Smith-Mundt Act, made it illegal for the government to conduct PSYOPS against US citizens. But that all changed in 2013 when the National Defence Authorization Act repealed that law and granted USAGM a licence to broadcast pro-government propaganda inside the United States.
To what extent US citizens are being targeted by propaganda is anyone’s guess, since PSYOPS largely take place online, where it’s difficult to distinguish between foreign and domestic audiences.
What we do know is that in 2009 the military budget for winning hearts and minds at home and abroad had grown by 63% to $4.7 billion annually. At that time the Pentagon accounted for more than half the Federal Government’s $1 billion PR Budget.
An Associated Press (AP) investigation in 2016 revealed that the Pentagon employed a staggering 40% of the 5,000 working in the Federal Government’s PR machines, with the Department of Defence, far and wide, the largest and most expensive PR operation of the United States government.
The Facebook’s-Intelligence-Harvard Connection
Consistent with the opaque nature of Facebook’s origins, shortly after its launch in 2014, co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Napster founder Sean Parker on board. At the age of 16, Parker hacked into the network of a Fortune 500 company and was later arrested and charged by the FBI. Around this time Parker was recruited by the CIA.
To what end, we don’t know.
What we do know is that Parker brought Peter Thiel to Facebook as its first outside investor. Theil, who remains on Facebook’s board, also sits on the Steering Committee of globalist think tank, the Bilderberg Group. As previously stated, Thiel is the founder of Palantir, the spooky intelligence firm pretending to be a private company.
The CIA would acquire an equity stake in the firm through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. At the time of his first meetings with Facebook, Theil had been working on resurrecting several controversial DARPA programs.
Which begs the question: With intelligence assets embedded in Facebook’s management structure from the get-go, is everything as it seems at 1 Hacker Way?
According to Lauren Smith, writing for Wrong Kind of Green:
“Some of Facebook’s allure to users is that Mark Zuckerberg and his friends started the company from a Harvard dorm room and that he remains the chairman and chief operating officer. If he didn’t exist, he would need to be invented by Facebook’s marketing department.”
By the same token, if Facebook didn’t exist it would need to be invented by the Pentagon.
To achieve this, you would need to embed government officials in Facebook’s leadership and governance. Cherry picking your candidates from, say, the US Department of Treasury, and launching the platform from an academic institution, Harvard University, for example.
According to the official record, Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook at Harvard in 2004. Like J.C.R Licklider before him, he was a psychology major.
Harvard’s President at that time was economist Lawrence Summers, a career public servant who served as Chief Economist at the World Bank, Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration, and 8th Director of the National Economic Council.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Summers’ protege, Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook’s COO since 2008. Sandberg was at the dials during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and predictably, manages Facebook’s Washington relationships. Before Facebook, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff at the Treasury under Summers and began her career as an economist, also under Summer, at the World Bank.
Another Summers-Harvard-Treasury connection is Facebook’s Board Member, Nancy Killefer, who served under Summers as CFO at the Treasury Department.
It doesn’t end there. Facebook’s Chief Business Officer, Marne Levine also served under Summers at the Department of Treasury, National Economic Council and Harvard University.
The CIA connection is Robert M. Kimmett. According to West Point, Kimmett “has contributed significantly to our nation’s security…seamlessly blending the roles of soldier, statesman and businessman. In addition to serving on Facebook’s board of Directors, Kimmett is a National Security Adviser to the CIA, and the recipient of the CIA Director’s Award.
The icing on the cake, however, is former DAPRA Director, Regina Dugan, who joined Facebook’s hardware lab, Building 8, in 2016, to roll out a number of mysterious DARPA funded-projects to, essentially, hack people’s minds with brain-computer interfaces.
As luck would have it, just before Duggan’s arrival at Facebook, the social media giant orchestrated the controversial mood manipulation PSYOP, known as the Social Contagion Study. The experiment would anticipate the role social media went onto play during the pandemic.
In the study, Facebook manipulated the posts of 700,000 unsuspecting Facebook users to determine the extent to which emotional states can be transmitted across social media. To achieve this, they altered the news feed content of users to control the number of posts that contained positive or negative charged emotions. As you would expect, the findings of the study revealed that negative feeds caused users to make negative posts, whereas positive feeds resulted in users making positive posts.
Once we understand this, it becomes clear how fear of a disease, which predominantly targeted people beyond life expectancy spread like wildfire in the wake of the Wuhan Virus. In locking down the UK, Boris Johnson warned the British public that we would all lose family members to the disease. When nothing could be further from the truth. The pandemic largely happened in the flawed doomsday modelling of epidemiologists, it happened across the corporate media, and it happened on social media platforms like Facebook. It wasn’t so much a pandemic, but the social contagion experiment playing out in real time.
But there was more than just social media manipulating our emotional states, fear, shame, and scapegoating was fife throughout as the British government deployed behavioural economics to, essentially, nudge the public towards compliance.
Launched under David Cameron’s Government, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), (affectionately known as the Nudge Unit), are a team of crack psychologists and career civil servants tasked with positively influencing appropriate behaviour with tiny changes.
But according to whose measure of appropriate behaviour, exactly?
A clue lies in the fact that BIT was directed by Sir Mark Sedwill during the first lockdown. He’s one of Britain’s most senior national security advisors with links to M15 and MI6.
That’s an intelligence operative ruling by psychological manipulation. Though we are led to believe, in a democracy the government is an agency of the people, given force of law by the will of the people.
But what happens when our consent is manipulated by those in power?
One consequence is that the foxes take charge of the chicken coop. Another is that we begin to see drastic changes to the constitutional landscape. Politicians acquire impunity from public scrutiny and an entire nation is kept under house arrest.
But this demonisation of the masses is also the backwash of a protracted counterinsurgency crusade waged on ordinary people. When the Berlin wall came down in the nineties and decades of counterinsurgency was rendered obsolete, the battlelines moved from East to the West, from the Soviets to the lower orders of society. The mythos of communist infiltration, that gave rise to the threat of terrorism, is the ancestor of today’s biosecurity state. A government that tightens its grip, using fear of a common enemy, will find no shortage of common enemies, to continue tightening its grip.
From Green Pass to Digital Nexus
Strong-arming the world’s population under the rubric of biosecurity would not have been possible without the internet, and if the expulsion of the military and intelligence community from academic institutions in the 1960’s had not resulted in the creation of Silicon Valley, they would not have acquired total information awareness, the precursor to the Green Pass.
But this formidable goal also caused the US to morph into the opponent it had been fighting during the cold war, as predicted by public intellectuals in the 1960s.
And so, with an annual budget of $750 billion and 23,000 military and civilian personnel in their employment, the Pentagon failed to denounce what many armchair researchers called out in the early days of the pandemic. That a global coup was underway was patently obvious, as crisis actors played dead in Wuhan, China.
Instead, those charged with protecting the west from Soviet-style putsch failed to apprehend it happening right under their noses. It’s not so much that they were caught with their trousers down, it’s that they aided and abetted the coop. Years of fighting a statist, expansionist adversary, caused the intelligence state to mutate into their nemesis, namely China.
It is uncanny that the country with the worst human rights record on earth became the global pacemaker for lockdowns, as western democracies exonerated their existential threat and bowed to China’s distinct brand of tyranny.
As a result, the big tech data analytics pioneered by Silicon Valley luminaries, that was road tested in China, finally landed on the shorelines of western democracies.
And in an ironic twist of fate, the intelligence state created at the end of world war II, under the National Security Act, conceived the very corporations that would bring about the end of constitutional democracy, that would author a new bill of rights from their own community standards de jour, and that would shift us from sovereign nation states to global governance, into the collectivist future the Pentagon had been charged with protecting us from.
As Goethe quote goes ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ Namely, anyone still looking through rose-tinted lenses in the digital age, oblivious to the fact they are victims of systematic addiction. The bread and circuses of the internet influences the same dopamine rewards centres and neural circuitry motivators as slot machines, cigarettes, and cocaine, as was originally intended by psychologists like JCR Licklider, at the helm of this new technology that would exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.
As we descend further into the maelstrom of the digital age, the algorithms will get smarter, the psychological drivers will become more persuasive and digital rubric will become more real. Until eventually we will lose touch with reality altogether. But don’t worry, this war of attrition is happening in conjunction with the roll out of new software and devices, and most will be too busy building their digital avatars or dissenting on social media to know any better.
