Can nuclear safety protocols be maintained in a poor country like Kyrgyzstan, where corruption is rampant?
The looming fight over nuclear power in Kyrgyzstan, eurasianet Aiday Erkebaeva Jan 4, 2023
On the electricity front, Kyrgyzstan may be reaching the end of the line. Demand is growing relentlessly, and yet the hydropower resources it has relied on historically are yielding diminishing returns.
Burning coal is pushing the country deeper into an ecological crisis, as attested to by the black blanket of smog that suffocates the capital, Bishkek, every winter.
With those considerations in mind, thoughts have focused ever more on pursuing a nuclear exit.
An important stride in that direction was taken at the ATOMEXPO-2022 international forum in the southern Russian city of Sochi, where representatives from the Kyrgyz Energy Ministry agreed for Russia’s Rosatom to conduct a feasibility study on installing a small nuclear reactor in Kyrgyzstan.
What backers of this idea have in mind is a plant powered by a compact nuclear reactor known as RITM-200N. This type of reactor is used at present on three Project 22220-class icebreakers developed by the St. Petersburg-based Baltic Shipyard.
Installation of such a reactor in Kyrgyzstan could happen no earlier than 2028, according to Russian media reports, but Kyrgyz Energy Minister Taalaibek Ibrayev is already speaking optimistically of the prospect. ……….
One reason that a RITM-200N reactor is highly unlikely to appear in Kyrgyzstan before 2028 is that Rosatom, whose subsidiary builds the reactors, operates on the policy that it will not install technology abroad that it has not already implemented in Russia itself. The first onshore installation of a RITM-200N-powered plant is happening at the Kyuchus gold deposit in Yakutia, and completion of that project is not expected for another five years.
It is just as well there is no rush, because finding a suitable site could prove challenging. As energy expert Boris Martsinkevich told Eurasianet, the location must hit the sweet spot: far away from potential areas of heightened seismic activity, but close enough to centers of major electricity consumption, so that the cost of installing new power lines does not make the whole project financially unsustainable. …………………
Stiff opposition is looming
A Bishkek-based environmental group called the Green Alliance laid out its objections in a statement in December. The organization is unmoved by the fact that RITM-200N would be a relatively small reactor.
“It is well known that even small sources of atomic energy and small amounts of radioactive substances can have a negative impact on both the environment and human health,” the alliance said in its statement.
In making its case, the Green Alliance borrowed from an argument made by opponents of a RITM-200N plant project in Yakutia, in Russia. Activists there cited the experience of the Bilibino nuclear power station, a small Soviet-vintage plant in a remote northeastern corner of Russia that is said to have been plagued by emergency shutdowns, questions over the nebulous disposal of spent nuclear fuel, and lack of profitability.
That last point about profitability is one that causes particular concern, since the worry is that cost-cutting could lead to skimping on safety protocols. Where nuclear power is concerned, the stakes are particularly high.
Green activists suggest instead that more emphasis be placed on exploiting Kyrgyzstan’s hydropower potential to its fullest, and that the authorities also tap into the potential of solar, wind and biomass energy. Even government officials have conceded that much more could be squeezed out of hydropower. …………………………………………
One more elephant in the room is corruption – a problem that no Kyrgyz government has to date been successful in tackling.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Kazakh service, Radio Azattyq, environmentalist Dmitry Kalmykov said that graft constituted one of the main arguments against Central Asian countries embracing nuclear power.
“If there is a high level of corruption in the country, if we constantly have high-ranking officials arrested, as a member of the public, I am going to think to myself: ‘They will build an atomic power plant, and when there is some technical inspection, again there will be corruption,’” Kalmykov told Azattyq last year. https://eurasianet.org/the-looming-fight-over-nuclear-power-in-kyrgyzstan
British-run spy tech powers Ukraine proxy war, putting civilians at risk
The GrayZone, KIT KLARENBERG·JANUARY 3, 2023
Leaked files reveal the Anomaly 6 spy firm is providing intelligence to the British military through a cut-out involved in the Kerch Bridge bombing and other acts of dangerous sabotage in the Ukraine conflict.
On December 6th, The Grayzone revealed how British military and intelligence agencies were deploying technology created by shadowy private intelligence firm Anomaly 6 to illegally spy on citizens across the globe.
The company’s technology effectively transforms every individual on Earth into a potential target for surveillance and/or asset recruitment by monitoring the movements of their smartphone. Anomaly 6 embeds tracking software in popular applications, then slices through layers of theoretically anonymous data to uncover a wealth of sensitive information about a device’s owner.
Anomaly 6’s services are provided to Britain’s soldiers and spies through Prevail Partners, a private military company which The Grayzone has exposed as Whitehall’s arm’s-length cutout for prosecuting its proxy war in Ukraine. The firm has constructed a secret partisan terror army on Kiev’s behalf, and helped plan the Kerch Bridge bombing by Ukraine’s services.
Now, the Grayzone can reveal that Prevail is exploiting Anomaly 6 to provide “decision-enabling intelligence to the UK’s defence and security architecture.”
Files anonymously leaked to this outlet reveal that Britain’s Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) has used Anomaly 6’s technology to monitor and track the movements of Russian military and intelligence personnel in real-time, on both a group and individual basis. Through aggressive harvesting of data, the technology has enabled the planning of military offensives and artillery attacks, assassinations, asset recruitment, and other measures.
The leaked files raise serious questions about whether Anomaly 6’s technology has been used throughout the Ukraine conflict in an array of targeted operations against specific individuals and infrastructure. If it has, Britain bears ultimate responsibility for the outcome of these disturbing actions, which in some cases amount to crimes against humanity.
As The Grayzone has already demonstrated, Anomaly 6 markets its technology as impeccably precise, while it hoovers up massive amounts of private data and targeting innocent individuals, falsely painting them as national security risks. The firm’s ham-handed approach raises the obvious risk of Russian and Ukrainian citizens being misidentified by Britain’s military intelligence apparatus, with dangerous if not deadly consequences.
British military intelligence tracks Russians ‘in realtime’
By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Anomaly 6 was already providing its surveillance services to the British Home Office through Prevail. Over the course of several months, the firm racked up a multi-million dollar tab.
Anomaly 6 sold its technology to Britain as an innovative means for tracking movements of newly-arrived refugees to the country. Without the migrants’ knowledge or consent, they were steered through “passive data collection gates” as soon as they registered at immigration centres. Their phones were then tagged for monitoring in the hope they could lead authorities to criminal gangs and human traffickers. ………………………..
This connivance is likely to have been completely illegal under data protection laws, and the European Convention on Human Rights.
As soon as Moscow launched its military operation, the British government deepened its involvement with Anomaly 6. London’s Defence Intelligence Agency instigated what it called “Project MATTERHORN”, a six week trial in which Prevail provided Anomaly 6-sourced “location-based commercial telemetry data” in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. ……………………….
It’s not hard to see why Anomaly 6’s services were considered so valuable by the DIA. Files reviewed by The Grayzone include case studies showing how the company’s technology was used both before and after the Russian invasion “to gain a realtime/near realtime understanding of the disposition” of Russian “troops, equipment, and lethal materials.”
For example, Anomaly 6 tracked Moscow’s pre-invasion military buildup, starting in April 2021. By harvesting smartphone data signals generated at a Russian Military training area south of Voronezh, the company identified over 100 devices that had been used at the facility, and was able to determine a clear “pattern of life,” including home addresses (or “bed down locations”), areas and sites frequently visited and workplaces for each user. ……………………………………………………………
Anomaly 6 fumbles targets’ identities, putting innocents at grave risk……………………………………
Though this level of detail seems impressive, Anomaly 6 could well have misidentified at least some of its targets, and even the locations they apparently visited. A leaked Anomaly 6 case study exposed by The Grayzone purports to document the company’s identification of the smartphone of a US-based nuclear physics expert who conducted “multiple trips to North Korea” between March and August of 2019.
Anomaly 6 outlined how it unearthed the academic’s name, address, marital status, employer, and photos of their children, along with the schools and universities they attended, by linking their smartphone to sites they visited across the US. The company believed the academic’s supposed trips to Pyongyang made them either a major counterintelligence hazard, or an intelligence asset ripe for recruitment.
When The Grayzone contacted the academic, however, they fervently denied they or their smartphone had ever been to North Korea. They may well have been sincere – smartphone geolocation data can be highly imprecise. If so, the academic and their family were placed in the crosshairs of Anomaly 6’s clients on the basis of a badly bungled analysis. In an active war zone, an error like this is likely to cost innocent lives.
Britain stiffens US resolve at all levels”
On August 20th, Ukraine’s CIA-trained Security Service (SBU) assassinated Daria Dugina, the daughter of nationalist Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, deploying a car bomb to kill her as she travelled through a Moscow suburb. The targeted killing was intended as a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been falsely portrayed in Western media as an avid student of Dugin, despite having never met him.
Given what is known about the operation to assassinate Aleksandr and Daria Dugin, the nature of Anomaly 6’s spyware, and Prevail’s relationship with the SBU, the question of whether the firm’s technology was used to track the pair is ineluctable.
Whether it also informed the SBU’s Odessa branch when to trigger the truck bombing of Kerch Bridge must be considered as well. The attempt to assassinate Russian State Space Corporation leaders Dmitry Rogozin and Artyom Melnikov while they dined at a Donetsk restaurant appears to have relied on tracking technology much like the kind spun out by Anomaly 6.
Then there are the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion’s death squads which hunt frantically for “collaborators” in formerly Russian-occupied territory. Have they too been granted use of Anomaly 6’s spyware?
These are only a few of the countless scenarios in which Anomaly 6’s technology could have executed. And it is not only London’s DIA that can exploit the company’s wares, courtesy of Prevail. So too can Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters, assorted elite military spying units, special forces such as the SAS and SBS, the GCHQ, MI5, and MI6.
Prevail’s involvement in the Kerch Bridge bombing plot amply demonstrates the company’s utter lack of compunction about civilian casualties and clear interest in terrorist acts. It originally proposed going further than what actually transpired, blowing up a ship packed with ammonium nitrate beneath the structure. The company approvingly cited the carnage caused by the 2020 Beirut Blast, which killed hundreds, injured thousands, and inflicted billions in damage, as an example to emulate.
As such, it seems inconceivable the British special forces veterans running Prevail would be anything other than enthusiastic about guiding Kiev’s most violent undertakings, or shy from carrying out such acts themselves.
Washington’s sharing of intelligence with Ukraine is well known, and has proven pivotal to the execution of an array of successful operations and counter-offensive actions. However, the White House claims to observe rigid limits on what it discloses and when, in order to prevent a wider war with Moscow. This has included a ban against providing precision targeting intelligence for senior Russian officials by name.
No such reservations or restrictions appear to exist in London’s case. In fact, the position of much of the British government, intelligence services, and Army appears to be that the proxy war must be escalated as much and as often as possible. Within London’s military-intelligence circles, any exercise of prudence by the Biden administration is seen as a reflection of cowardice.
On December 16th, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak demanded an audit of the progress of the war in Ukraine to date. The disclosure piqued intense fears within Whitehall that the new premier could emulate and thus exacerbate the “caution” of the Biden administration. A nameless source revealed to the BBC at the time London had “stiffened the US resolve at all levels,” via “pressure.”
“We don’t want Rishi to reinforce Biden’s caution. We want him to [keep] pushing in the way Boris did,” they explained.
Senior British military-intelligence veteran Chris Donnelly echoed this perspective in a chilling email sent to Brigadier Julian Buczacki of the British Army’s elite 1st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade just hours after the Kerch Bridge assault. Donnelly was a driving force behind that attack, directing his underlings to draw up blueprints for it. He is also the mastermind of Prevail’s secret Ukrainian terror army.
Invited to serve as an “expert” high-level advisor in “escalation” to London’s Chief of Defence Staff, Donnelly condemned Biden’s supposedly careful approach to the conflict as “so unwise as to beggar belief,” and “the opposite word to ‘deterrence’.”
With the political leadership in London under unrelenting pressure to accept Donnelly’s radical view of the conflict, it appears almost certain the UK will seek new and more brazen means of provoking Russia into escalating. The forces gathered around Prevail are determined to throw caution to the wind, even if it means tempting a nuclear winter. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/01/03/british-spy-tech-ukraine-war/
This Year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners are deeply connected to the CIA
The entire Nobel Peace Prize ceremony this year seemed to be part of a public relations spectacle whose purpose was to mobilize public opinion against Russia and to support a military escalation of the war in Ukraine.
Whereas at one time genuine peace activists—like Emily Greene Balch, Linus Pauling and Martin Luther King, Jr.—were awarded the prize, now it is being conferred on war propagandists and national traitors in the pay of foreign masters who are using them merely as pawns in a deadly game in which there are no winners.
By Covert Action magazine, Jeremy Kuzmarov, December 21, 2022
Far-fetched as it sounds, this year’s winners are all connected to a CIA offshoot, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and parroted CIA / State Department / Pentagon talking points about Ukraine and Russia in their acceptance speeches
The Nobel Prize Committee has five judges, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, who are tasked with choosing Nobel Prizewinners.
But people are starting to wonder if there is a 6th Nobel Prize judge, not appointed by the Norwegian parliament, but by the CIA, who is tasked with making sure that winners of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize advance the agenda of U.S. policy makers.
Although the idea may seem far-fetched, this year’s winners all have connections to a CIA offshoot, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Oleksandra Matviichuk, for example, who accepted this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Ukraine Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) on December 10, had received the NED’s annual Democracy Award on behalf of the CCL six months earlier.[1]
The NED was founded in the 1980s to promote propaganda and regime-change operations in the service of U.S. imperial interests. Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to creation of the NED remarked in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The two other recipients of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian dissident, and Memorial, a human rights organization expelled from Russia for violating its foreign agent law, have also received NED awards and probable financing.
While the Nobel Peace Prize has previously gone to warmongers like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama,[2] never before has it gone to organizations that were intricately associated with a foreign intelligence agency specializing in political skullduggery and psychological warfare.
The entire Nobel Peace Prize ceremony this year seemed to be part of a public relations spectacle whose purpose was to mobilize public opinion against Russia and to support a military escalation of the war in Ukraine.
In their victory speeches, all three Peace Prize recipients ritually denounced Russian war crimes and aggression and issued support for the war in Ukraine. Oleksandra Matviichuk also directly asked the Norwegian government for more air defense for Ukraine and other types of weapons.
Promoting a Fairy Tale Version of Reality
Matviichuk’s speech was notable for its overt Russophobia and Manichaean view of world affairs that showed a fundamental naiveté about the character of Western governments.
Matviichuk said that the West had turned a blind eye to Russia’s “destruction of its own civil society,” and “shook hands with the Russian leadership, built gas pipelines and conducted business as usual” when, for decades, “Russian troops had been committing crimes in different countries.”
In Matviichuk’s telling, the “innocent” West is complicit in appeasing Russia—though for the last few decades, it was U.S. troops and its proxies that rampaged across the Middle East and committed massive war crimes.
All while Russia has often intervened in self-defense against U.S.-NATO aggression—like in Georgia in 2008—or at the request of a besieged ally, like in Syria, where it saved the country from the fate of Libya which had been destroyed by the 2011 U.S.-NATO intervention.
Matviichuk claimed in her speech that the war in Ukraine is “not a war of two states—but of two systems—authoritarianism and democracy.”
If that is the case, it is not clear which side she is on as her president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has banned eleven opposition parties, including the communist party, which is legal in Russia, and mounted a Phoenix-style operation to silence dissidents.
Matviichuk suggested earlier in her speech that the world had not adequately responded to “the act of aggression and annexation of Crimea, which were the first such cases in post-war Europe.”
Crimea, however, had historically been part of Russia and was never invaded. Its people voted to rejoin Russia in a referendum after the U.S. and EU had backed a right-wing coup in Ukraine that represented a vital security threat to Russia on its border.
Matviichuk presented more false history when she claimed that “the Russian people were responsible for this disgraceful chapter in their history [the invasion of Ukraine] and their desire to forcefully restore their former empire.”
Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, however, was not an attempt to restore the Russian empire, but was carried out in response to genuine national security threats that Russia faced as a result of the right-wing coup in Ukraine and NATO advancement on its border.
Matviichuk further omits that Russia was carrying out a genuine humanitarian intervention by trying to save the people of eastern Ukraine who had been the target of an ethnic-cleansing operation by the Ukrainian military, which left 14,000 civilians dead.
Matviichuk concluded part of her speech by stating:
People of Ukraine want peace more than anyone else in the world. But peace cannot be reached by the country under attack laying down its arms. This would not be peace, but occupation. After the liberation of Bucha, we found a lot of civilians murdered in the streets and courtyards of their homes. These people were unarmed. We must stop pretending deferred military threats are ‘political compromises.’ The democratic world has grown accustomed to making concessions to dictatorships. And that is why the willingness of the Ukrainian people to resist Russian imperialism is so important. We will not leave people in the occupied territories to be killed and tortured. People’s lives cannot be a ‘political compromise.’ Fighting for peace does not not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”
It is astounding that someone would use the platform accorded to her by winning a major world peace prize to try to rationalize a war that her country had started—in 2014 when it attacked the people of eastern Ukraine who voted for more autonomy after a foreign-backed coup in Ukraine, and after the post-coup government imposed draconian language laws.[3]
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019) has even disclosed that Ukraine had no intention of abiding by the Minsk peace agreements, which could have prevented a full-scale conflict with Russia. Instead, Ukraine signed those agreements as a stalling tactic to give it more time to build up its military power and accrue more weaponry and support from the U.S. so it could fight Russia from a position of strength.
Matviichuk promoted more disinformation by suggesting that the Russians had killed all the civilians in Bucha, as in-depth investigations have determined that many civilians were killed in Bucha by the Ukrainians after Russian forces were expelled…………………………………………
Honoring a Propaganda Agency That May Well Help Ignite World War III
While the Nobel Peace Prize has not always honored true peace activists, a truly ominous precedent has been set in giving it to a propaganda agency that may well help ignite World War III.
A key part of CCL’s current mission is to document Russian war crimes in Donbas—though Ukraine has been responsible for the majority of human rights crimes there since the war started after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014—when CCL started this work.[4]
Residents from towns in eastern Ukraine have reported on widespread rapes and torture of captured prisoners by Ukrainian troops and constant shelling of civilian centers and terror bombing over an eight-year period.
This is ignored by the CCL, which instead has tried to spotlight the stories—real or imagined—of victims of sexual violence by Russian troops in Ukraine and women abducted by Russian troops and taken into captivity in Russia.
Further, the CCL has mounted an international campaign to release the Kremlin’s political prisoners, and aims to raise awareness about political persecution in what it calls Russian-occupied Crimea—which is not “occupied” since its people voted to rejoin Russia in a referendum.
The CCL fashions itself as a particular champion of the Crimean Tatars, some of whom had collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II and who had long been used by outside powers to try to destabilize Russia and foment ethnic conflict as part of a strategy of divide and conquer.
Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, who received an award from the NED in 2018, travelled to the NATO headquarters in Brussels after the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014 agitating for an armed intervention by the UN to return Crimea to Ukrainian control, and has been a militant proponent of sanctions against Russia……………………..
Belarusian Winner Also Has NED Connection
The politicized nature of this year’s Nobel Prize ceremony was apparent in the selection of a Belarusian dissident, Ales Bialiatski, as co-winner of the Peace Prize.
Jailed for “financing group actions that disrupted public order,” Bialiatski was part of an NED-sponsored uprising and color revolution in 2020-2021 that failed to overthrow Belarus’s socialist ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, who had saved his country in the 1990s by rejecting Western-imposed privatization and shock therapy programs and sustained a strong social safety net.[5]…………………………..
By helping to paint Lukashenko as a monster in national and international media, Bialiatski’s organization and others of his kind serve U.S. imperial interests by helping to mobilize popular support for a regime-change operation directed against Europe’s last true socialist government.
Yet Another NED Connection
The third winner of this year’s Nobel Peaze Price is a banned Russian human rights organization, Memorial, whose work includes preserving the memory of the victims of Soviet gulags and Joseph Stalin’s reign, and documenting political repression and human rights violations in Russia.[6] In 2004, its director, Arseny Roginsky, was awarded the 2004 NED Democracy Award………………………………………
Should It Be Renamed the Nobel War Prize?
The Nobel Peace Prize has tarnished its reputation through many of its past selections; but this year seems worse then ever with the Nobel ceremony providing a platform for anti-Russia war incitement.
In the future, all pretenses should be thrown aside and the prize finally renamed the Nobel War Prize.
Whereas at one time genuine peace activists—like Emily Greene Balch, Linus Pauling and Martin Luther King, Jr.—were awarded the prize, now it is being conferred on war propagandists and national traitors in the pay of foreign masters who are using them merely as pawns in a deadly game in which there are no winners. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/12/21/nobel-peace-prize-winners-have-deep-cia-ties/?mc_cid=67528e0987
US spies pushed Twitter to censor ‘anti-Ukraine narratives’ – media
more
https://www.rt.com/news/568879-twitter-files-cia-collusion/ 28 Dec 22
New batch of of files exposes collusion with ‘other government agencies’.
The Pentagon, CIA and other US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies became increasingly “more aggressive” with takedown requests, the latest trove of Twitter files has revealed. The documents suggest the agencies were effectively pushing the platform to censor foreign-policy stories that ran against the Washington-approved narrative.
The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the Christmas Eve edition of the Twitter Files, released with the blessing of the social media platform’s owner, Elon Musk.
Thousands of censorship requests flowed to Twitter from what were termed OGA” in the documents, or “Other Government Organizations,” through the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.
Twitter executives often struggled to validate government claims, but were under constant pressure to find evidence to blame any foreign actor, Russia in particular.
“Found no links to Russia,” an unnamed analyst said in one of the emails, later suggesting he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.” Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth admitted in another instance that he’d found “no real matches using the info.”
Internal communications show that Twitter had been getting so many requests that its executives had to improvise a system for prioritizing them. The feds had dedicated personnel tasked with tailoring takedown requests to Twitter’s policies for faster processing, which the execs acknowledged as “odd,” but even then the company often struggled to justify censorship.
“Many people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the FITF/FBI,” Taibbi wrote. At least some of these directives originated at the CIA, according to former agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who said he “recognized the formatting.”
The feds sometimes sent massive batches of over 1,000 accounts lined up for “digital execution,” with only a brief explanation of the alleged problems. On multiple occasions they accused “Russian agents” of directing accounts that highlighted “predominantly anti-Ukraine narratives” or documented “purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians.”
Another intelligence assessment sent to Twitter claimed that accounts spreading information about “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine were part of a Kremlin-controlled propaganda campaign and must be banned.
In what Taibbi called a “damning admission,” an unnamed former CIA-turned-Twitter executive once noted that the “government partners” were getting increasingly “aggressive” with their takedown requests.
In what Taibbi called a “damning admission,” an unnamed former CIA-turned-Twitter executive once noted that the “government partners” were getting increasingly “aggressive” with their takedown requests.
“Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” he said about the InfoBRICS account. He further argued that since “BRICS is an inherently Russia-dominated economic organization” it was “always likely…directed by the Kremlin.”
“Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution and reporting on it…I’m going to go ahead with suspension and marking the domain UNSAFE.”
Spearheaded by Taibbi in cooperation with fellow reporters Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and others, the Twitter Files have shed light on several controversial decisions made by the company, including material surrounding the suspension of ex-President Donald Trump, the practice of shadow banning, as well as a site-wide ban on a New York Post report about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.
The files also explained how the US intelligence community worked hand-in-glove with the platform to flag speech for suspension that the US government deemed “misinformation,” and showed how the FBI and Twitter locked horns over the agency’s claims of increased activity by ‘propaganda’ bots, of which Twitter said it found no evidence.
Every social media firm censors for US government – Musk
Platforms remove content at the “explicit direction” of US federal agencies, the Twitter CEO has claimed.
Rt.com 28 Dec 22,
All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.
“*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”
Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi with his approval, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the run-up to the 2020 election.
In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”
A lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms in 2020 to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19…………………………….
https://www.rt.com/news/569016-musk-social-media-censorship/
Atomic Bomb Effects Cover-up Reported in New York Times
https://www.wanttoknow.info/atomicbombcoverup— 25 Dec 22
The below article is an excellent example of how even the New York Times has twisted the facts and manipulated public opinion in order to support a deeper agenda. This revealing story covers the bombing of Hiroshima back in 1945, yet the same deceptive techniques of distortion and manipulation continue to be used today to support the profit-making war machine.
The New York Times itself acknowledged government and media complicity in hiding the effects of the Atomic bomb in an Aug. 3, 2005 Reuters article they published titled “U.S. Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima for Decades.” Read this revealing article on the Times website on this webpage.
[Note: Since this message was originally posted in 2004, the New York Times removed the article at the above link. A web search shows that no other major media have this revealing story posted. Thankfully, you can still read a copy of this Reuters article on a foreign news website.]
Here’s a quote from this Reuters article, “In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the new weapons.” The below article goes into greater detail on the depth of deception. Please help to inform others by sharing this revealing news with your friends and colleagues and exploring the “What you can do” section below.
Hiroshima Cover-up:
How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Aug. 10, 2004
At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.
Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.
Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and and describe radiation sickness.
Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”
He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”
Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. “When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”
Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.
Reporters whose dispatches [conflicted] with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.
Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began. Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”
Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.” Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”
But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.
William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing – which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers – were written by none other than Laurence.
“Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”
“Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials – he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.
In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”
Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets – from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing – and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”
Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)
W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”
Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.
The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”
On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.
As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting ” – as long as it is from the United States?
It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.
The original of the above article published on Aug. 10, 2004 is available here.
Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show “Democracy Now!.” This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, written with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence. Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240 stations.
Important Note: A profound 22-minute video features interviews of a number of “atomic soldiers” who were ordered to watch the nuclear bomb blasts from as close as a mile away. They were sworn to secrecy under a penalty of a $10,000 fine (roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars) or 10 years in jail and instructed never to talk to their wives or their fellow soldiers about anything they saw or experienced. Don’t miss this incredible film, available on this webpage, that the U.S. government doesn’t want you to see.
Dishonesty: British authorities knew it was wrong to proceed with the thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp) at Sellafield.
Letter William Walker: In 1993, a government official told me that “it
was sometimes right to do the wrong thing”. For reasons of political
expediency, it was right to give political consent for the operation of the
thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp) at Sellafield.
This huge facility, not mentioned in Samanth Subramanian’s fine long read, had been built over
the previous decade to reprocess British and foreign, especially Japanese,
spent nuclear fuels. Abandoning it would be too embarrassing for the many
politicians and their parties that had backed it, expensive in terms of
compensation for broken contracts, and damaging to Britain’s and the
nuclear industry’s international reputation.
It was wrong to proceed, as
the government well knew, because the primary justification for its
construction – supply of plutonium for fast breeder reactors (FBRs) – had
been swept away by the abandonment of FBRs in the 1980s (none were built
anywhere).
Because returning Thorp’s separated plutonium and radwaste to
Japan would be difficult and risky.
Because decommissioning Thorp would
become much more costly after its radioactive contamination.
Because there was a known win-win solution, favoured by most utilities – store the spent
fuel safely at Sellafield prior to its return to senders, avoiding the many
troubles that lay ahead.
Guardian 22nd Dec 2022
The SECOND suburban husband indicted for smuggling nuclear weapon tech to Russia
- Vadim Yermolenko helped smuggle tech used in nuclear weapons into Russia, according to court documents
- DailyMail.com can reveal his double life after it emerged co-defendant Alexey Brayman runs an online craft store in New Hampshire with his wife
- They are allegedly part of the ‘Serniya Network’, run by Russia’s security service
- Yermolenko lives in a luxury home with his wife, Diana, and their young children
- He allegedly used his wife’s signature to create forged documents for the plot
- The men, who were indicted and appeared in court on Tuesday, have been released after posting bail and will appear in court again in February
By LEWIS PENNOCK FOR DAILYMAIL.COM . 15 December 2022 …………………………… more https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11538183/SECOND-suburban-husband-indicted-smuggling-nuclear-weapon-tech-Russia.html
Maligned in Western Media, Donbass Forces are Defending their Future from Ukrainian Shelling and Fascism
Covert Action Magazine, By Eva Bartlett, – November 19, 2022
America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother
meared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.
Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.
But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk 2 peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.
Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally sent troops into Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Special Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.
Voices From the Frontlines of Former Eastern Ukraine Republics
In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbas commanders I spoke with there.
To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbas.
From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.
It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbas forces now controlling it.
One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbas to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.
“We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.”
There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”
His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.
A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbas, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.
An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.
A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”
The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.
Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.
“We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian………………………..
And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]
He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country…………………………………..
I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:
“Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”
“It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”……………………………….
Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War
Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]
“America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there……………………
And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.
However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. ………………………………………
Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders
While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbas republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.
The sacrifices which the people of the Donbas republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense………..
These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/11/19/maligned-in-western-media-donbass-forces-are-defending-their-future-from-ukrainian-shelling-and-fascism/
How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control
The market for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — is booming. Even the U.S. government is using it.
New York Times, By Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv and Nicosia, Cyprus, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels, Athens and Nicosia. Dec. 9, 2022
The Biden administration took a public stand last year against the abuse of spyware to target human rights activists, dissidents and journalists: It blacklisted the most notorious maker of the hacking tools, the Israeli firm NSO Group.
But the global industry for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — continues to boom. Even the U.S. government is using it.
The Drug Enforcement Administration is secretly deploying spyware from a different Israeli firm, according to five people familiar with the agency’s operations, in the first confirmed use of commercial spyware by the federal government.
At the same time, the use of spyware continues to proliferate around the world, with new firms — which employ former Israeli cyberintelligence veterans, some of whom worked for NSO — stepping in to fill the void left by the blacklisting. With this next generation of firms, technology that once was in the hands of a small number of nations is now ubiquitous — transforming the landscape of government spying.
One firm, selling a hacking tool called Predator and run by a former Israeli general from offices in Greece, is at the center of a political scandal in Athens over the spyware’s use against politicians and journalists…………….
Predator was found to have been used in another dozen countries since 2021, illustrating the continued demand among governments and the lack of robust international efforts to limit the use of such tools…………………….
The most sophisticated spyware tools — like NSO’s Pegasus — have “zero-click” technology, meaning they can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, without the user having to click on a malicious link to give Pegasus remote access. They can also turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner. But hacking tools without zero-click capability, which are considerably cheaper, also have a significant market.
Commercial spyware has been used by intelligence services and police forces to hack phones used by drug networks and terrorist groups. But it has also been abused by numerous authoritarian regimes and democracies to spy on political opponents and journalists. …………………………………………………….
Similar to Pegasus, the NSO tool, Graphite spyware can invade the mobile phone of its target and extract its contents. But unlike Pegasus, which collects data stored inside the phone itself, Graphite primarily collects data from the cloud, after data is backed up from the phone. This can make it more difficult to discover the hack and theft of information, according to cybersecurity experts………………………………………………………………….
Predator
………………………………………………… Predator requires the targeted user to click on a link to infect the user’s phone, whereas Pegasus infects the phone without any action from the target. That means Predator requires more creativity to entice already wary targets to click.
Predator infections come in the form of carefully crafted, personalized instant messages and infected links mimicking established websites. Once the phone is infected, the spyware has many of the same snooping capabilities of Pegasus, according to experts. An investigation into Predator by Meta listed about 300 such sites that experts had found were used for Predator infections.
………………………………………………… Meta, as well as the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization, detected Predator in Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Madagascar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Vietnam, the Philippines and Germany. These locations were determined through internet scans for servers known to be associated with the spyware.
Over the past few months, Predator has also roiled public life in Greece, where it was found to have been used against journalists and opposition figures. The Greek government has repeatedly described the spyware as illegal and said it had nothing to do with it.
Despite the denunciations, Greece admitted to backing Intellexa and its spyware in a vital way: by licensing the company to export Predator to Madagascar, whose government has a history of cracking down on dissent………………………………. more https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/us/politics/spyware-nso-pegasus-paragon.html
UK government may be covering up the extent of its involvement in the arrest and incarceration of Julian Assange
MINISTER ‘MISLED PARLIAMENT’ ON FOREIGN OFFICE ROLE IN SECRET ASSANGE OPERATION New information suggests the UK government may be covering up the extent of its involvement in the arrest and incarceration of the WikiLeaks founder.
https://declassifieduk.org/minister-misled-parliament-on-foreign-office-role-in-secret-assange-operation/ MATT KENNARD AND JOHN MCEVOY 2 DECEMBER 2022
A British MP has accused a Foreign Office minister of “misleading parliament” over his department’s involvement in the secret operation to arrest Julian Assange.
Kenny MacAskill MP, a former Scottish justice secretary, asked the Foreign Office “whether any people working on Operation Pelican were based within [its] Department’s premises.”
Pelican was the secret Metropolitan Police-led operation to seize Assange from his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which was mounted in April 2019.
Junior foreign minister David Rutley told parliament last week in answer: “No Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FDCO] officials were directly assigned to work on Operation Pelican.”
However, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request in July last year, the Foreign Office had already admitted: “Three FCDO officials did some work on Operation Pelican, the most senior of which was Head of Latin America Department.”
Declassified on Tuesday revealed the UK government had assigned 15 staff to Pelican, but this number did not include any Foreign Office personnel.
‘Misled parliament’
Under the Ministerial Code, ministers have a duty to “be as open as possible with parliament” and to “give accurate and truthful information”. A House of Commons guide states that “this requirement governs the answers ministers provide to parliamentary questions”.
The misleading of parliament is a serious charge that can lead to a minister’s resignation or sacking.
David Rutley, the Conservative MP for Macclesfield, has been foreign minister for the Americas and Caribbean since October 2022, and serves under foreign secretary James Cleverly.
A supporter of Rishi Sunak, Rutley has met the US ambassador to Britain and travelled to Colombia and Panama since taking up office.
Kenny MacAskill, MP for East Lothian, told Declassified: “This new information shows that foreign minister David Rutley misled parliament in answering my recent question. It demonstrates not just the standard obfuscation I have become used to, but actual distortion of the facts about the UK government’s effort to ‘get’ Julian Assange.”
He added: “The actions of the British government have not simply been to assist the US. They have been active and willing participants in the state-sponsored cruelty meted out to Assange. And then tried to hide it all.”
18 officials
Operation Pelican’s existence was only revealed in the memoirs of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan which were published last year. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case.
For instance, the Home Office and the Cabinet Office have refused FOI requests regarding communication between departments about Pelican. The Foreign Office claimed it holds no information on the matter.
In March, Home Office minister Kit Malthouse even told parliament that his department, despite having eight staff assigned to Pelican, holds no information about which other ministries were involved.
Then, in a later response to a FOI request, the Home Office refused to confirm or deny whether it holds information on inter-departmental communication about Pelican. This refusal to rule out whether the Home Office does hold information on the matter raises concerns that Malthouse may also have earlier misled parliament.
The new information takes up to 18 the number of officials the UK government has admitted to deploying on Operation Pelican.
These included senior officials such as the Deputy National Security Advisor at the Cabinet Office and the International Director at the Home Office, according to documents obtained by Declassified through a FOI request.
Declassified has revealed that four of Britain’s most powerful government ministries, including the Foreign Office, are refusing to say if their officials have met with US authorities to discuss Julian Assange.
UK GOVERNMENT DEPLOYED 15 STAFF ON SECRET OPERATION TO SEIZE JULIAN ASSANGE
New information raises further concerns about the politicisation of the WikiLeaks founder’s legal case.
https://declassifieduk.org/uk-government-deployed-15-staff-on-secret-operation-to-seize-julian-assange/ MATT KENNARD, 28 NOVEMBER 2022
- Assange had been granted asylum by a friendly country to avoid persecution by the US government for his journalistic activities
- But Home Office had eight staff, and the Cabinet Office had seven, working on secret police operation to arrest Assange
- Ministry of Justice, which controls England’s courts and prisons, refuses to say if its staff were involved in operation
- Foreign Office refuses to say if its premises were used
The British government assigned at least 15 people to the secret operation to seize Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, new information shows.
The WikiLeaks founder was given political asylum by Ecuador in 2012, but was never allowed safe passage out of Britain to avoid persecution by the US government.
The Australian journalist has been in Belmarsh maximum security prison for the past three and a half years and faces a potential 175-year sentence after the UK High Court greenlighted his extradition to the US in December 2021.
‘Pelican’ was the secret Metropolitan Police operation to seize Assange from his asylum, which eventually occurred in April 2019. Asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The operation’s existence was only revealed in the memoirs of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan which were published last year. The UK government routinely blocks, or obfuscates its answers to, information requests about the Assange case.
But the Cabinet Office recently told parliament it had seven officials working on Operation Pelican. The department’s role is to “support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government”, but it also has national security and intelligence functions.
It is not immediately clear why the Cabinet Office would have so many personnel working on a police operation of this kind. Asked about their role, the Cabinet Office said these seven officials “liaised” with the Metropolitan Police on the operation.
The Home Office, meanwhile, told parliament it had eight officials working on Pelican. The Home Office oversees MI5 and the head of the department has to sign off extraditions to most foreign countries. Then home secretary Priti Patel ordered Assange’s extradition to the US in June.
‘Disproportionate cost’
Other government ministries refused to say if they had staff working on Pelican, including the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).
The MoJ is in charge of courts in England and Wales, where Assange’s extradition case is currently deciding whether to hear an appeal. It is also in control of its prisons, including Belmarsh maximum security jail where Assange is incarcerated.
When asked if any of its staff were assigned to Pelican, the MoJ claimed: “The information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.”
It is unclear why the Home Office, a bigger department with more staff, could answer such a question, but the MoJ could not. There is no obvious reason why the MoJ would have staff assigned to Pelican, so revelations that it did would cause embarrassment for the government.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Office told parliament it had no staff “directly assigned” to Pelican, but refused to say if people working on the operation were located on its premises.
‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team’
Sir Alan Duncan, foreign minister for the Americas from 2016-19, was the key UK official in the diplomatic negotiations between the UK and Ecuador to get Assange out of the embassy. In his memoirs he wrote that he watched a live-feed of Assange’s arrest from the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office alongside Pelican personnel.
After Assange had been imprisoned in Belmarsh, Duncan had a drinks party at his office for the Pelican team. “I gave them each a signed photo which we took in the Ops Room on the day, with a caption saying ‘Julian Assange’s Special Brexit Team 11th April 2019’”, he wrote.
Ecuador’s president from 2007-17, Rafael Correa, recently told Declassified he granted Assange asylum because the Australian journalist “didn’t have any possibility of a fair legal process in the United States.”
He added that the UK government “tried to deal with us like a subordinate country.”
In September 2021, 30 former US officials went on the record to reveal a CIA plot to “kill or kidnap” Assange in London. In case of Assange leaving the embassy, the article noted, “US officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.”
These assurances most likely came from the Home Office.
‘Publishing is not a crime’: media groups urge US to drop Julian Assange charges
First outlets to publish WikiLeaks material, including the Guardian, come together to oppose prosecution
Guardian, Jim Waterson Media editor, 28 Nov 22
The US government must drop its prosecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange because it is undermining press freedom, according to the media organisations that first helped him publish leaked diplomatic cables.
Twelve years ago today, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak. The material, leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning, exposed the inner workings of US diplomacy around the world.
The editors and publishers of the media organisations that first published those revelations have come together to publicly oppose plans to charge Assange under a law designed to prosecute first world war spies.
“Publishing is not a crime,” they said, saying the prosecution is a direct attack on media freedom.
Assange has been held in Belmarsh prison in south London since his arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019. He had spent the previous seven years living inside the diplomatic premises to avoid arrest after failing to surrender to a UK court on matters relating to a separate case.
The then UK home secretary, Priti Patel, approved Assange’s extradition to the US in June but his lawyers are appealing against this decision.
Under Barack Obama’s leadership, the US government indicated it would not prosecute Assange for the leak in 2010 because of the precedent it would set. The media outlets are now appealing to the administration of President Joe Biden – who was vice-president at that time – to drop the charges.
The full letter sent by the media organisations
Publishing is not a crime: The US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.……………………………………………………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/28/media-groups-urge-us-drop-julian-assange-charges?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
Ukrainian city names street after Nazi collaborator
Vinnitsa is replacing world-famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy with Stepan Bandera https://www.rt.com/russia/567200-vinnitsa-tolstoy-bandera-street/ 27 Nov 22
The city council of Vinnitsa in Ukraine announced on Friday it was renaming one of its streets after WWII Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. The local authorities described their drive to rid the city of all toponyms linked to Russia as a “process of decolonization.”
The street previously bore the name of Leo Tolstoy, the 19th-century Russian author of world renown. Vinnitsa authorities said they paid “special attention” to memorializing those they described as “heroes of the national liberation struggle.” Bandera, who led a nationalist movement responsible for many atrocities against Russians, Jews and Poles in WWII, is regarded as a national hero by the current Ukrainian authorities.
Another street was named after Ivan Treiko, one of the “generals” and the “military intelligence chief” of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary group that also collaborated with the Nazis. Warsaw in particular has blamed the UPA for the genocide of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. The ethnic cleansing operations against Poles were ordered by Nazi Germany and carried out by paramilitary units that consisted primarily of ethnic Ukrainians.
A total of 232 toponyms have been changed as part of the “decolonization” campaign in Vinnitsa and neighboring towns, the city council said, praising itself as one of the “most active participants” of this nationwide drive.
Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, has renamed one of its streets after the notorious Azov regiment, which has had open neo-Nazis in its ranks. That street previously bore the name of the Soviet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky. Ukrainian by origin, Malinovsky liberated much of southern Ukraine, including his home city of Odessa, from the Nazis in 1943-1944.
In June, the mayor of Odessa expressed his concern over the growing enmity for “all things Russian” amid the prolonged conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
The removal of references to Russia from street names and other institutions has been a trend in Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan coup, but intensified after the launch of Moscow’s military operation.
Mayor of Ukraine’s second-largest city fined for speaking Russian
The Kharkov city head has been accused of violating the law by addressing his fellow residents in a “non-state” language.
https://www.rt.com/russia/567137-ukraine-mayor-fined-russian-language/ 24 Nov 22
Kiev has slapped the mayor of Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkov, with a fine for using what the authorities called a “non-state” language in an official TV address. Mayor Igor Terekhov is known for addressing his fellow residents in Russian.
Terekhov will have to pay a fine of 3,400 hryvnas ($92) for violating Ukrainian law, Taras Kremin, the Ukrainian government’s commissioner for the protection of the state language, said in a statement on Thursday.
The mayor had “used non-state language in his addresses to the residents of the city of Kharkov” during a news telethon, the statement read, calling this an “administrative offense.” The language commissioner’s office also issued an administrative warning to the mayor’s office, telling it to only use Ukrainian on the mayor’s social media pages.
Terekhov has until December 4 to appeal the commissioner’s decision, the statement read. The Ukrainian authorities did not specify what language the mayor had used during the telethon, but the Ukrainian media reported that he was known for regularly addressing his fellow residents in Russian.
According to the language commissioner’s office, Terekhov and some Kharkov city council members have already been found in violation of the state language law. It is unclear if they were sanctioned back then as well.
The Ukrainian state language law was signed by then-President Pyotr Poroshenko back in 2019, five days before his presidential mandate expired. The legislation requires Ukrainian public officials to use only the Ukrainian language when discharging their duties.
Ukrainians are also required to use the Ukrainian language in the fields of public services, medical care, education and science, as well as in the media, although certain exceptions are allowed. A person found in violation of this law might face a fine of up to 8,500 hryvnas ($230), which can be further doubled for a repeated offense.
In mid-June, the language commissioner was granted the right to impose fines on those found in violation of the law. In October, an assistant professor at the Ukrainian National Aviation University was slapped with a fine of 3,400 hryvnas ($92) for teaching through a “non-state language.”
1 This Month
of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- April 2026 (7)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 