Patriot Pony

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EDITOR’S NOTE—This section is reserved as an editorial and may not necessarily reflect the policy of this publication.

Do you remember the Takata airbag recall?

The Takata corporation made defective airbag charges that would explode, sometimes spontaneously, and send pieces of metal shrapnel into the faces and necks of drivers.

In 2014 one young lady died and a dozen more were wounded. That one death prompted the historic record recall of 65 million vehicles in the U.S. and a fine of $200 million against Takata. Over the next few years more drivers died. 17 in the US and 27 world wide.

Now look at the gene injection for COVID. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, no recall, no admission of responsibility. The deaths continue. What’s the difference?

The manufacturers have no liability for injuries and deaths from the use of their products. ***** The ending of the annexation ceremony in Moscow was quite impressive.

Western mainstream media has us to believe that morale is dreadfully low in Russia. We’re told their military is crumbling and their economy is in tatters. But video of the annexation ceremony shows a vastly different picture.

Our mainstream media here in the United States is pure propaganda full of lies, illusions, and manipulations. We now can understand why western big tech and western governments banned all social media and news that Russians put out. Your opinion of Russia is solely based on what the west has told you. This is war in 2022.

Big Brother watching? Government agencies buying cell phone, internet data to track Americans

A growing partnership between third party data brokers and law enforcement agencies is raising alarm bells among civil liberties lawyers.

By Aaron Kliegman

In a little noted trend, law enforcement agencies at every level of government are increasingly buying data from private, thirdparty data brokers on Americans' phone and internet activities in order to track them, often without a warrant.

While proponents say this practice provides critical help for investigations, critics argue it poses a serious violation of civil liberties that needs to be addressed through legislation.

One of the latest revelations about this controversial public-private partnership came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to "defending civil liberties in the digital world."

EFF recently obtained a trove of records through Freedom of Information Act requests on local and state police departments, as well as federal entities, purchasing a cellphone tracking tool that can monitor people's movements going back months in time.

The tool, Fog Reveal, is a product of the company Fog Data Science, which claims it has "billions" of data points about "over 250 million" devices that can be used to learn where people work, live, and associate.

Fog has past or ongoing contractual relationships with at least 18 local, state, and federal law enforcement clients, according to the documents reviewed by EEF.

Law enforcement has used the Fog data for a wide range of investigations, from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracking the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Associated Press reported.

According to Fog, it's providing a helpful service so law enforcement agencies can better do their jobs.

"Local law enforcement is at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, yet these departments are often behind in technology adoption," Matthew Broderick, a Fog managing partner, told the AP. "We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments."

Others see the arrangement as a violation of Americans' civil liberties and the U.S. Constitution.

"Reporting and a recent investigation by EFF confirms that law enforcement across the country is regularly getting access to our private movements —with the ability to retrace our daily lives — often without a warrant," Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney for EEF, told Just the News. "This is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment and permits broad surveillance that can sweep up anyone who happens to be near the scene of a crime."

Law enforcement agencies are getting much of this information from data brokers such as Fog, which harvest consumers' location data from app developers and then sell it to the agencies.

Specifically, various smartphone apps request location access in order to enable certain features. Once a person grants that access, the app is able to share it with other parties. Data brokers strike deals with the app developers —or with other data brokers —through various arrangements to obtain the information and sell it.

Many private entities, such as hedge funds and marketing firms, buy this location data for business purposes. However, other clients are from the government —namely federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as military and intelligence agencies.

The government's interest in such data extends beyond phones to internet usage.

Multiple branches of the U.S. military have bought access to an internet monitoring tool that claims to cover over 90% of the world's internet traffic and can also provide access to people's email data, browsing history, and other information such as their sensitive internet cookies, according to documents reviewed by Vice last week.

The documents reveal the sale and use of a monitoring tool called Augury, which is developed by the cybersecurity firm Team Cymru and bundles a massive amount of data together and makes it available to government and corporate customers as a paid service.

Vice found that the U.S. Navy, Army, Cyber Command, and the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency have collectively paid at least $3.5 million to access Au(Continued on page 16)

Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020

Biden administration gave millions in tax dollars to groups after election, records show. Election Integrity Partnership says it had 35% success rate getting tech platforms to label, remove or restrict content.

By Greg Piper and John Solomon

A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of publicprivate partnership to evade the First Amendment's prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.

Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP —were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through midNovember 2020, with "monitoring intensif [ying] significantly" the week before and after Election Day.

The tickets sought removal, throttling and labeling of content that raised questions about mail-in ballot integrity, Arizona's "Sharpiegate," and other election integrity issues of concern to conservatives.

The consortium achieved a success rate in 2020 that would be enviable for baseball batters: Platforms took action on 35% of flagged URLs, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% softblocked, meaning users had to reject a warning to see them. The partnership couldn't determine how many were downranked.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any laws that abridge free speech, and courts have ruled that prohibition extends to federal agencies funded by the legislative branch. Participants were acutely aware that federal agencies' role in the effort strayed into uncharted legal territory.

For instance, SIO's Renee DiResta said in a CISA Cybersecurity Summit video in 2021 that the operation faced "unclear legal authori(Continued on page 16)

(Continued from page 15)

gury, allowing them to track internet usage and access large amounts of sensitive information. agree to all an app's terms, they also agree to potentially being surveilled by the government.

In a letter last week to the inspectors general for the Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security departments, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote that a whistleblower contacted his office concerning the alleged warrantless use and purchase of this data from Augury by NCIS, a civilian law enforcement agency that's part of the Navy. According to Wyden, the whistleblower came to him after filing a complaint through the official reporting process with the Pentagon.

The purpose of Wyden's letter was to request the the agency watchdogs investigate the warrantless purchase of Americans' internet traffic data. Wyden expressed concern that by obtaining information from thirdparty data brokers and avoiding any judicial review process, government agencies were circumventing the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements, which are meant to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Last month, the House approved changes to next year's military budget requiring the Defense Department to disclose any purchases of smartphone or web browsing data that would normally require a warrant.

Government watchdogs have previously addressed the issue of warrants. Last year, for example, J. Russell George, inspector general of the Treasury Department, responded to an inquiry from Wyden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) about the IRS purchasing location data from data broker Venntel.

George wrote that IRS officials said they didn't need a warrant because "the information available had been voluntarily turned over through individual permissions" in the apps and devices they use. Among the largest government buyers of bulk location data is the Department of Homeland Security and several of its agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol.

DHS has paid millions of dollars in recent years to purchase, without warrants, cellphone location data from two companies to track the movements of both Americans and foreigners inside the U.S., at U.S. borders, and abroad, according to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union in July.

Also in July, the Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration demanding the release of all documents related to DHS' contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based data mining and surveillance company.

The contract concerns a Babel Street product capable of retrieving and copying data both from online sources and from apps running on the smartphones and other devices of billions of people worldwide.

In announcing its lawsuit, Heritage expressed concern about DHS working with private companies to monitor Americans' social media accounts and the prospect of government agencies searching and aggregating the data.

Other federal departments and agencies have partnered with data brokers. The FBI last year released its own contracts with Venntel, although they were heavily redacted. The documents showed the bureau paid $22,000 for a single license to the Venntel Portal.

For critics, legislation is necessary to ensure the government doesn't infringe on the rights of citizens. and unconstitutional," said Mackey. "This harmful surveillance is only possible because there is no federal law that ensures that everyone can control their private data. It's past time Congress acted to protect our private information from both private and government surveillance."

Some senators are reportedly pushing for legislation that would limit the ability of law enforcement agencies to buy data to track people's whereabouts without a warrant.

Many of the federal government purchases aren't meant to surveil Americans inside the U.S.

In one project, for example, researchers at Mississippi State University used a service provided by Babel Street to track movements around Russian missile test sites, including those of highlevel diplomats. The U.S. Army funded the project.

The Iowa Air National Guard and U.S. Special Operations Command have also used information from data brokers for operations overseas.

Still, the potential for surveilling Americans has many prominent legal experts concerned.

"The only reason we permit private people to track you for business purposes is because we assume that it won't end up in government hands," renowned civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show Tuesday. "If the government wanted to do the same thing, they'd need a warrant. I mentioned they tracked Mike Lindell He was hunting with his friends, and he was at Hardees —how did they find him? Did they buy data? Or did they have a GPS on him? Or did they track his cell phone? ...

"It's just too much Big Brother. And the connections now between private industry and the government is becoming one of the great issues of the 21st century: Google and Facebook and whether or not Google and Facebook have to take instructions from the government." ties" and "very real First Amendment questions." She joined SIO from a firm exposed by The New York Times for creating "a 'false flag' operation" against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Mike Benz, an ex-State Department official who was slated to be the department's first-ever digital freedom ambassador if President Donald Trump had won a second term, discovered much of the consortium's work in research for his new Foundation for Freedom Online, a nonprofit which advocates for free speech globally while monitoring growing U.S. censorship.

He told Just the News the consortium was the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation he had ever seen, a precursor to the now-scrapped Disinformation Governance Board and one that is likely to grow in future elections.

"If you trace the chronology, you find that there was actually 18 months' worth of institutional work to create this very apparatus that we now know played a significant role in the censorship of millions of posts for the 2020 election and has ambitious sights for 2022 and 2024," he said.

"Amazingly, there are now so many Ministry of Truth functionaries within the Department of Homeland Security," he added. "There are so many Ministry of Truth tasks, so many Ministry of Truth points of contact, so many different Ministry of Truth, policies for whether to remove something, reduce it, slap a fact checking label on it."

Rep. Andrew Clyde (RGa.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the revelations "stunning" and said the 2020 operation amounted to the federal government sanctioning and outsourcing censorship.

"The government knows that they cannot do it by themselves because of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits it," Clyde told the "Just the News, Not Noise" television show. "And then they decide to partner with another entity, a private entity. a social media platform or university.

"And then they say, 'Hey, we're going to feed you information that we think is disinformation, or we want to be disinformation. And then you go ahead and you do the deplatforming. You label it as misinformation, or disinformation.'"

Clyde said he expects Republicans to investigate the consortium next year if they gain control of Congress and that he is drafting legislation called the Free Speech Defense Act to address censorship issues.

"This bill would prevent the federal government from labeling anything through a proxy entity, like a social media company, as disinformation, labeling it as misinformation or labeling it as true," he explained. "And then it would also give an opportunity for those people who have been injured by it to take legal action."

Homeland Security, CISA, EIP and the Stanford and UW projects did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment from Just the News.

It wasn't just blogs and individual social media users whose content was targeted for removal and throttling as "repeat spreaders" of misinformation. News and opinion organizations, including the New York Post, Fox News, Just the News and SeanHannity.com were also targeted.

The partnership's members published the 292page public report in March 2021, though the most recent version is dated June 15, 2021. The launch webinar featured former CISA Director Christopher Krebs, "who led the effort to secure electoral infrastructure and the response to misand disinformation during the election period."

"I think we were pretty effective in getting [platforms] to act on things they haven't acted on before," both by pressuring them to adopt specific censorship policies and then reporting violations, SIO founder and former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos told the launch webinar. (He and Krebs started their own consultancy after the election.)

"Platform interventions" in response to "delegitimization of election results," for example, went from uniformly "non-comprehensive" in August 2020 to "comprehensive" by Election Day, the report says.

The partnership has not drawn widespread attention, however. Congressional testimony Benz's Foundation (click to continue reading)