When You Control The Media, You Control The Government. Trump's Problems Are Proof

Big Brother In America Is Now The U.S. Media

TOPICS:MediaPropagandaRory Hall

MARCH 6, 2017

By Rory Hall

Journalism and a free, open media is another “check and balance on the three branches of Government and we don’t have that check and balance anymore.” – Shadow of Truth

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian political regime is control of the media. In 1996 president Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This law, which was bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies, allowed big corporations to acquire and consolidate media outlets nationwide.

The 1996 law lifted the limit on the number of television and radio stations any one corporation could own. In 2003, the FCC voted to lift the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and full-power broadcast stations that serviced the same community. This was the final nail in the coffin of free and competitive media and news reporting in the U.S.

The 1996 Clinton law followed by the lifting of the cross-ownership ban enabled Corporate America to increase their monopoly on the flow of information in the U.S. and around the world. Now six corporations control well over 90% of all media in the U.S.: NewsCorp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast.

“Wall Street slips on and geopolitical worries” (Reuters headline). What does the Trump/Obama wiretapping squabble have to do with whether the stock market goes up or down? It has nothing to do with whether or not corporations can produce goods and services profitably. To be sure the accusation of wiretapping and the possibility that the accusation is accurate is troublesome in and of itself. But it has nothing to do with the fact that the stock market is currently the most overvalued in U.S. history.

The headlines, however, reflect the degree to which all media reporting in the U.S. is now under the control of Corporate America – a Corporate America that has assumed control of the political process and has become Orwell’s Big Brother.

Most people associate the term “fascism” with an authoritarian and nationalistic political system. But it’s much more than that. Mussolini described “fascism” as the merger between corporations and government. The political system in the U.S. can easily be considered “fascist,” as Corporate America and Wall Street have used billions of dollars to take over the entire political process including all of the mainstream outlets of communication and news reporting.

The result is directly reflected in the nature of the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. The content of any news reporting is now a product of the material fed through the broadcast and print communication outlets controlled by six corporate monoliths and the Too Big To Fail banks that finance the system.

A good friend and colleague of the Shadow of Truth, John Titus, once quipped with regard to the public’s consumption and acceptance of anything reported as news, “put it on CNN and it’s true.” This statement succinctly summarizes the propaganda which supports the process by which the government seeks to control the views and perceptions of the public at large. In today’s Shadow of Truth podcast, we toss around that fact that the United States has become a Goebellsian “playground” and George Orwell’s nightmare:

You can read more from Rory Hall at his site The Daily Coin, where this article first appeared.

More Government Spying, More Big Brother

BIG BROTHER NOW SPYING ON BOATERS

'The program goes far beyond marine safety'

Published: 14 hours ago

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2011/10/runruh.jpg

 BOB UNRUH 

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You’ve saved and scrimped and you bought a decent-size boat so that you can sail along the coast. Or maybe drop a line in the water and watch the clouds while people think you’re fishing. Or maybe take friends out for a day on the water.Did you know the government is watching?

That’s more than likely if you’re the conscientious type of boater who insists on the latest safety equipment.

The federal government has a program that tracks and records the location of boaters, and an organization that defends privacy rights is demanding officials cough up information so people know more about what’s going on.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center this week filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security over the program.

It simply, EPIC said, “exceeds the stated purpose of marine safety and constitutes an ongoing risk to the privacy and civil liberties of boaters across the United States.”

The lawsuit focuses on the Nationwide Automatic Identification System, which is set up to “collect, integrate and analyze information concerning vessels operating on or bound for waters subject [to] United States jurisdiction.”

“We respect the important work of the Coast Guard and also understand the value of AIS for collision avoidance, but the program goes far beyond marine safety,” explained EPIC President Marc Rotenberg.

The data about boaters, the organization claims, would be transferred by the DHS to other federal agencies, state agencies and even foreign governments.

EPIC said the BoatU.S. Foundation, a large coalition of recreational boaters, warned the program “raises an array of confidentiality concerns with regard to the recreational boating public.”

Few boaters, they noted, would be aware that their detailed location information would be handed over to a variety of parties in addition to other boaters and the Coast Guard.

Rotenberg said: “The collection and disclosure of personal information by a federal agency raises significant questions about compliance with federal privacy law. The Coast Guard failed to fulfill its obligations under the federal Privacy Act and also never undertook a required Privacy Impact Assessment.

“It is for these reasons that EPIC is now in court seeking information about the NAIS program.”

There are an estimated 12 million registered boats in the U.S., used by an estimated 70 million people.

“A sailor’s Good Samaritan effort to share location data will automatically enroll them in a data bank that tracks all of their movements,” said Ralph Naranjo, former Vanderstar Chair at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The case, brought by EPIC against the federal agencies, was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

EPIC said the surveillance network is believed to collect information on vessels in coastal and territorial waters.

“Transceivers located near 58 U.S. ports and 11 U.S. coastal areas … gather information from vessels equipped with the Automatic Identification System, a ship-to-ship collision avoidance system used worldwide,” the organization reported.

The AIS broadcasts the vessel’s name, course, speed, classification, call sign and registration number.

Vessels more than 65 feet long are required to have it; owners of smaller craft can choose.

Nearly 13,000 vessels already are on the watch list, officials said.

The complaint seeks government records that reveal details about the program and alleges, “This system of data collection and analysis, implemented at the direction of the DHS, is contrary to the USCG’s general support for the privacy of boaters and the protection of their personal information.”

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Big Brother Is No Longer A Mythical Character. We Are Experiencing It Right Now.

Will Detroit Be The First Major Chinese City In The United States?

Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
May 6, 2014

Virtually everything that you do is being watched. Do you drive a car? Do you watch television? Do you use a cell phone? As you do any of those things, information about you is being recorded and tracked. We live at a time when personal privacy is dying. And it is not just governments that are doing this.

Image: Surveillance Room (Wiki Commons).

In fact, sometimes private companies are the biggest offenders. It turns out that gathering information about all of us is very, very profitable. And both government entities and private companies are going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to high tech surveillance until people start objecting to what they are trying to do. If we continue down the path that we are currently on, it is inevitable that we will end up living in an extremely restrictive “Big Brother” police state where basically everything that we do is very closely watched, monitored, tracked and controlled. And such a day may be much closer than you think. The following are 10 examples of how “Big Brother” is steadily creeping into our daily lives…

#1 Our cars are rapidly being transformed into high tech “Big Brother” surveillance devices. In fact, a push is being made to require all new vehicles to include very sophisticated black box recorders…

As if the government wasn’t already able to track our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

Yet strip away the glib Orwellian doublespeak, and what you will find is that these black boxes and V2V transmitters, which will not only track a variety of data, including speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and seatbelt use, but will also transmit this data to other drivers, including the police, are little more than Trojan Horses, stealth attacks on our last shreds of privacy, sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on our lives.

Black boxes and V2V transmitters are just the tip of the iceberg, though. The 2015 Corvette Stingray will be outfitted with a performance data recorder which “uses a camera mounted on the windshield and a global positioning receiver to record speed, gear selection and brake force,” but also provides a recording of the driver’s point of view as well as recording noises made inside the car. As journalist Jaclyn Trop reports for the New York Times, “Drivers can barely make a left turn, put on their seatbelts or push 80 miles an hour without their actions somehow, somewhere being tracked or recorded.” Indeed, as Jim Farley, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Motor Company all but admitted, corporations and government officials already have a pretty good sense of where you are at all times: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.”

#2 A new Michigan law will ban thousands of preppers and small farmers from owning farm animals. What are they going to do next? Ban us from growing our own food?

#3 Have you ever collected anything? If so, the FBI might swoop in and grab your collection someday even if you have not committed a crime. If you think that this sounds crazy, you should consider what happened to a man named Don Miller recently…

FBI agents Wednesday seized “thousands” of cultural artifacts, including American Indian items, from the private collection of a 91-year-old man who had acquired them over the past eight decades.

An FBI command vehicle and several tents were spotted at the property in rural Waldron, about 35 miles southeast of Indianapolis.

The FBI did not have any evidence that a crime had been committed prior to seizing the collection, and Mr. Miller has not been arrested or charged with any crime. The FBI says that it is going to catalog the collection “to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately”…

The aim of the investigation is to determine what each artifact is, where it came from and how Miller obtained it, Jones said, to determine whether some of the items might be illegal to possess privately.

#4 A father of a 4-year-old girl has been told that he will no longer be allowed to send healthy homemade lunches with his daughter when she attends her pre-kindergarten program because they conflict with federal guidelines.

#5 Do you watch television? Well, if you have a newer television there is a very good chance that your television is watching you as well…

In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discoveredthat his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway.

#6 A plan that is being proposed in Fairfax County, Virginia would ban “frequent and large gatherings at neighborhood homes“. This would include parties, scout gatherings and home Bible studies.

#7 At a public school in Florida, a 12-year-old boy has been banned from reading the Bible during “free reading time”…

A Florida schoolteacher humiliated a 12-year-old boy in front of an entire class after she caught him reading the Bible during free reading time.

The teacher at Park Lakes Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale ordered Giovanni Rubeo to pick up the telephone on her desk and call his parents.

As the other students watched, the teacher left a terse message on the family’s answering machine.

“I noticed that he has a book—a religious book—in the classroom,” she said on the recording. “He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom.”

#8 In the USSA, a young child cannot even build a tree fort with his friends without the threat of being confronted by the police state. Just consider what happened to one little fifth-grade boy down in Georgia a few weeks ago…

A fifth-grader says he was terrified when a police officer pointed a gun at him and his friends while they built a tree fort.

Omari Grant, 11, said he and his friends often play in a wooded area behind his home and were building a fort when a neighbor in the next subdivision called police to complain about what the boys were doing.

But no one anticipated what Omari and his mother say happened next.

“I guess the release of tension was like, ‘Mom, he had a gun in my face, Mommy. Mommy, he had a gun in my face,’” said Janice Baptiste, Omari’s mother.

The officer reportedly used very filthy language as he pointed his gun at the boys, and he forced them to get out of the tree and lay down on the ground…

“I was thinking that I don’t want to be shot today, so I just listened to what they said,” Omari said.

Omari said the officer holding his gun also used foul language and made him and his friends lay down on the ground.

“I learned that they’re supposed to help you not make you feel scared to even come outside,” Omari said.

#9 People like to joke about “the eye in the sky”, but it is no joke. Technology that was originally developed for “blanket surveillance” during the Iraq war is now returning home…

Persistent Surveillance Systems has developed a surveillance camera on steroids. When attached to small aircraft, the 192-megapixel cameras record the patterns of the planetary life they fly over for hours at a time. According to the Washington Post, this will give the police and other customers a “time machine” they can simply rewind when they need it. Placed strategically at the highest points of any town or city, these cameras could provide the sort of blanket surveillance that’s hard to avoid. The inventor of the camera, a retired Air Force officer, helped create a similar system for the city of Fallujah, the site of two of the most violent battles of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It’s just one example of how wartime surveillance technologies are returning home for “civilian use.”

#10 Have you ever purchased storable food? If so, you should know that it is now considered to be “suspicious activity” in some areas of the country. Just check out what is happening in New York state…

1-866 SAFE NYS is part of Safeguard New York, an NY State counterterrorism program that uses promotional material to encourage citizens to report people for engaging in “suspicious activity….which makes them stand out from others”.

An accompanying letter provided by the state trooper listed such “suspicious activity” as the purchase of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), flashlights, weather proof ammunition, night vision equipment, match containers, or gas masks.

For even more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled “19 Signs That America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Giant Surveillance Grid“.

Sadly, most Americans are totally oblivious to all of this.

Most Americans are so addicted to entertainment and to their electronic devices that they have no idea what is going on in the real world.

I came across the following video entitled “Look Up” on YouTube earlier today. I think that it does a great job of showing what our obsession with our electronic devices is doing to us. Watch it for yourself and see what you think…

Watch What You Write In Your Emails

Please remind me, isn't this the land of the free? Don't we have freedom of speech? It appears as if the FBI and a bunch of other federal agencies did not get the memo. They are monitoring all of our emails every day. This is not the way freedom is preserved.

To make sure they know what is going on, the government is building storage facilities to store all of  your emails even if you were writing to your Aunt Tilly. Can you imagine the amount of garbage they are storing? More frightening is the prospect that anyone, like us bloggers, will have our words come back to haunt us!  

Can you imagine an out-of-control government using word searches to convict people on trumped up charges of sedition?  Could you defend yourself from things you have written to a friend, no less a public forum like a blog? What if the President enacted a proclamation that says all guns needed to be collected and you said "I will go to jail before giving up my guns."  Do you think the government might come calling?

Or better yet, in a personal email to a friend, you write that the President should be convicted of treason or worse, do you think you might have just put yourself into the line of fire? 

The answer is you must self-monitor what you say. Yes, we mean self censor yourself unless you want the government to come after you.

Friends, we have a government which is storing emails which only means that they are going to use the information for something. Be smart and don't put yourself in the middle of a mess.  

Our freedom of speech is becoming very limited. Not only cannot you yell "fire" in a theater (a good reason for limiting speech) but more importantly, try to use any racial epithet or tell a joke about a certain group and if heard by the wrong person, you will find  yourself in a "sensitivity" class. What you say might have been really dumb, insensitive and make you look like a real idiot, however, isn't that each American's right? 

It is only a small step from where we are today to a time where it is made illegal to criticize any elected official, including the President.  We already have regulations that make it illegal to be within a 1000 feet of the President with a sign critical of him.

So watch what you write, Big Brother is watching!

Conservative Tom

The Government Has Your Emails, All Of Them

December 5, 2012 by Sam Rolley 

PHOTOS.COM

A National Security Administration whistle-blower said in a recent interview that the U.S. government collects massive troves of data about American citizens, which it could use against anyone it chooses.

Speaking with RT, William Binney, a former NSA mathematician and code breaker, said that the Federal government uses a powerful data collection tool to store the contents of virtually every email sent by anyone in the Nation.

“[T]he FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason — they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least,” he said.

Binney said the government is collecting the information in bulk without any regard to whether the individuals whose information is being stored is subject to criminal investigation at this time or is considered a threat to national security. According to the former NSA agent, the data is collected with a powerful information technology device called Naris which is capable of collecting all information being sent over fiber optic cables in the United States. The information is then stored in vast data collection centers where it can be searched later by Federal agents.

This sort of vast data snooping by the Federal government was first brought to light when it was discovered that the NSA was working with AT&T to monitor customer phone and Internet activity via a secret office at the company’s headquarters. The discovery led to a lawsuit and much stonewalling by the Federal government.

Binney says government surveillance of data over fiber optic networks has increased since the first lawsuit was filed against AT&T for allowing Fed snoops to mine its data networks. He claims that under the Administration of Barack Obama the government has even had to build larger facilities to store all of the data it is collecting from Americans’ inboxes.

“They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it,” he said. “That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the electronic frontiers foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.”