The performers helped kick off the first day of hearings on regulating online content by urging the CRTC to make Internet service providers follow the same rules as television and radio broadcasters and protect Canadian content online.

“This is a battle for the future. What we want is a place for Canadian storytellers and our stories,” said Richard Hardacre national president of ACTRA, the union representing 21,000 English-speaking artists across all media platforms. “We want to share our talents with Canadians and with global audiences. We need to get it right now. Tomorrow is too late.”

The CRTC first looked into licensing new media in 1999 but with few households at the time having access to high-speed Internet it decided that licensing would not contribute to its development and that exempting it would not make it difficult for licensed broadcasters to follow the rules.

With 93 per cent of Canadian households having broadband access and anyone being able to watch videos and television shows, play games and listen to music online, the CRTC has decided to revisit the issue.

The ACTRA representatives highlighted that point in their presentations and said licensing new media will provide needed funding and protection of Canadian content.

Joanna Smith
Toronto Star

Read entire article

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The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.

Since then things have gotten much, much worse.

Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”

That was driven home late last year, when a malicious software program thought to have been unleashed by a criminal gang in Eastern Europe suddenly appeared after easily sidestepping the world’s best cyberdefenses. Known as Conficker, it quickly infected more than 12 million computers, ravaging everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer networks of the French military.

Conficker remains a ticking time bomb. It now has the power to lash together those infected computers into a vast supercomputer called a botnet that can be controlled clandestinely by its creators. What comes next remains a puzzle. Conficker could be used as the world’s most powerful spam engine, perhaps to distribute software programs to trick computer users into purchasing fake antivirus protection. Or much worse. It might also be used to shut off entire sections of the Internet. But whatever happens, Conficker has demonstrated that the Internet remains highly vulnerable to a concerted attack.

“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.

The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.

“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

Read Full Article

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A debate over the use of internet filtering is heating up in Europe. Privacy advocates and carriers are going head to head with authorities.

In Finland, programmer Matti Nikki is under investigation for publishing a secret list of domains that authorities had allegedly censored in an effort to stop the spread of child pornography. Nikki published his list to prove the system was being abused, and was himself censored as a result. The Finnish Chancellor of Justice has received a complaint about police handling of the matter.

The authorities distribute their list to the country’s 20 largest ISPs, which then block access to the sites. The rest of Finland’s 200 ISPs haven’t implemented the technology, so protection is far from complete.

The problem with filtering is that it is a very blunt tool, according to Swedish Internet activist Oscar Swartz.

“I have seen the list Nikki published, and it includes links to sites with regular pornography, so they shouldn’t be censored,” said Swartz.

The Finnish police force is aware of the problems with filtering.

“The technology we currently use works well with sites that only include child pornography. To filter sites with a mixture of content, we need to use other technologies as well,” said Lars Henriksson, chief superintendent at the National Bureau of Investigation.

Finland isn’t the only country where the temperature is rising. Danish authorities recently decided to block file-sharing site Pirate Bay, after pressure from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). ISP Tele2 decided to fight the court order. They are so far the only ISP that has been ordered to shut off access to The Pirate Bay, but IFPI has plans to expand the blocking.

Other organizations are starting to show an interest in the use of filtering, including mobile network operators. They are banding together to combat the distribution of child pornography.

“We are here to tackle a very disturbing and damaging phenomenon,” said Craig Ehrlich, chairman of the GSM Association, a group of mobile network operators, launching the initiative at a conference in Barcelona last week.

The use of emotive issues to justify the introduction or extension of censorship worries some.

“It’s easy to ignore the negative aspects of filtering and censorship when talking about something so universally disliked as child pornography,” said Swartz.

But state censorship proposals don’t stop there: The European Union’s Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini called last September for ISPs to block access to Web sites hosting information about bomb-making, and U.K. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said in January that she wanted action taken against sites that encouraged terrorism, including social networking sites.

Such actions could have wider consequences: “If the E.U. starts to filter sites related to piracy, terrorism, and child pornography, it will have some serious effects on the freedom to communicate,” said Swartz.

By Mikael Ricknäs
Infoworld

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The unbridled freedom that once characterized the Internet is gradually being reined in by states — democratic and authoritarian alike–as cyberspace is increasingly viewed as a strategic, geopolitical frontier, according to the Canadian co-author of a new international report.

Waning are the days of the World Wide Web as a free-for-all of information accessible to anyone, said Ron Deibert, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies and member of the OpenNet Initiative, which released its latest findings last week.

“Particularly since 2001, there’s been a growing recognition of the way in which the Internet has facilitated all sorts of unintended consequences that these states find threatening, in particular the mobilization of opposition movements, militants, extremists networks, human rights information that exposes what non-democratic states do,” Prof. Deibert said.

What began in 2002 as an effort by scholars at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and the U of T to monitor widespread Internet censorship by a handful of regimes has now been expanded into the world’s freedom-of-information watchdog, keeping tabs on some 26 jurisdictions from Australia to Zimbabwe.

While countries such as China are known to have what Prof. Deibert calls “ambitious” and overarching filtering programs that bar access to certain Internet address or forbid certain key word searches, other states have begun interfering with the Internet suddenly and surreptitiously for short-term gain.

He points to recent elections in Belarus, where authorities gradually censored opposition Web sites, then slowly eased controls. During the Cambodian vote, the government shut down all text messaging.

“It points to a new type of just-in-time filtering, where states who are hesitant to be labelled as pariahs by openly filtering in the Chinese-style method instead look to these unconventional methods that are more difficult to monitor … and yet are just as effective, especially during critical periods,” Prof. Deibert said.

“There’s a recognition among authorities that while these tools are very important for economic development, they can also unleash a lot of unforeseen consequences on the political spectrum and so they’re looking for ways to control them with ever more fine-grained methods.”

Western democracies are by no means immune to the trend of tightening Internet censorship, though Prof. Deibert pointed out that regulation is more transparent and accountable.

Australia, with no constitutionally enshrined free-expression laws, “maintains some of the most restrictive Internet policies of any Western nation,” the OpenNet Initiative reports.

Australia regulates the availability of offensive content, issues takedown notices for Internet content hosted within the country and finances an “opt-in” filtering program that blocks undesirable content from outside of the country.

Canada does not actively impede access to the Web. Instead, it has anti-hate, antichild- pornography and defamation laws.

But themost interestingexampleofWeb censorship uncovered in Canada occurred in the private sector, the report says, referring to the case of a major telecommunications company blocking access to union sites during a labour dispute.

He added that the tools regimes such as Iran, Yemen and Saudi Arabia are using to squelch free speech and undermine political opposition is the same made-in-America software being developed for businesses seeking to keep their employees off gambling sites and MySpace in the office.

A new era is dawning where countries increasingly view cyberspace as a zone of strategic importance to their national security as well as their economies, Prof. Deibert said. “So you’ve seen a great effort, beginning with the United States but also among Russia and China, to develop information warfare methods and doctrines. So I think that has effectively unleashed what I would call an arms race in cyberspace.”

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The Government will block “controversial” websites with a universal national filter.

A provision whereby Internet users could opt out of the filter by contacting their ISP has been stripped from the legislation, meaning the filter will be universal and mandatory.

The System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it will restrict web access, raise prices and slow internet traffic speeds.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia,” reports the Australian Herald Sun.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”. (Complete black is white, up is down, double talk).

Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it.”

Speaking from personal experience, not only are “controversial” websites blocked in China, meaning any website that is critical of the state, but every website the user attempts to visit first has to pass through the “great firewall,” causing the browser to hang and delay while it is checked against a government blacklist.

This causes excruciating delays, and the user experience is akin to being on a bad dial-up connection in the mid 1990’s. Even in the center of Shanghai with a fixed ethernet connection, the user experience is barely tolerable.

Not only are websites in China blocked, but e mails too are scanned for “controversial” words and blocked from being sent if they contain phrases related to politics or obscenities.

Googling for information on certain topics is also heavily restricted. While in China I tried to google “Bush Taiwan,” which resulted in Google.com ceasing to be accessible and my Internet connection was immediately terminated thereafter.

The Australian government will no doubt insist that their filter is in our best interests and is only designed to block child pornography, snuff films and other horrors, yet the system is completely pointless because it will not affect file sharing networks, which is the medium through which the vast majority of such material is distributed.

If we allow Australia to become the first “free” nation to impose Internet censorship, the snowball effect will only accelerate - the U.S. and the UK are next.

Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair called for Internet censorship last year.

In April 2007, Time magazine reported that researchers funded by the federal government want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the system whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time. The projects echo moves we have previously reported on to clamp down on internet neutrality and even to designate a new form of the internet known as Internet 2.

Moves to regulate the web have increased over the last two years.

- In a display of bi-partisanship, there have been calls for all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens by both Democrats and Republicans alike.

- In December 2006, Republican Senator John McCain tabled a proposal to introduce legislation that would fine blogs up to $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards. It is well known that McCain has a distaste for his blogosphere critics, causing a definite conflict of interest where any proposal to restrict blogs on his part is concerned.

- During an appearance with his wife Barbara on Fox News in November 2006, George Bush senior slammed Internet bloggers for creating an “adversarial and ugly climate.”

- The White House’s own de-classified strategy for “winning the war on terror” targets Internet conspiracy theories as a recruiting ground for terrorists and threatens to “diminish” their influence.

- The Pentagon has also announced its effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandizefor the war on terror.

- In an October 2006 speech, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a “terror training camp,” through which “disaffected people living in the United States” are developing “radical ideologies and potentially violent skills.” His solution is “intelligence fusion centers,” staffed by Homeland Security personnel which will are already in operation.

- The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress. Criminal charges including a possible jail term of up to one year could be the punishment for non-compliance.

- A landmark November 2006 legal case on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and other global trade organizations sought to criminalize all Internet file sharing of any kind as copyright infringement, effectively shutting down the world wide web - and their argument was supported by the U.S. government.

- A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.

- The European Union, led by former Stalinist John Reid, has also vowed to shut down “terrorists” who use the Internet to spread propaganda.

- The EU data retention bill, passed after much controversy and implemented in 2007, obliges telephone operators and internet service providers to store information on who called who and who emailed who for at least six months. Under this law, investigators in any EU country, and most bizarrely even in the US, can access EU citizens’ data on phone calls, sms’, emails and instant messaging services.

- The EU also proposed legislation that would prevent users from uploading any form of video without a license.

- The US government is also funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine. “At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.”

Governments are furious that their ceaseless lies are being exposed in real time on the World Wide Web and have resolved to stifle, regulate and control what truly is the last outpost of real free speech in the world. Internet censorship is perhaps the most pertinent issue that freedom advocates should rally to combat over the course of the next few years, lest we allow a cyber-gag to be placed over our mouths and say goodbye to our last medium of free and open communication.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

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Program mirrors U.S. Air Force, Centcom propaganda

Israel’s global reputation for being the new Nazis was already firmly established, but the ceaseless and indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, labeled a war crime by international observers, has hardened opinion against the country and this has manifested itself nowhere more than the world wide web.

Israel’s response will be to flood the Internet with PR agents who will attempt to create a phony consensus that the ZIonist state’s barbarian actions are justifiable.

According to a report in Haaretz, the Immigrant Absorption Ministry is setting up “an army of bloggers” who will “represent” Israel on “anti-Zionist blogs” in English, French, Spanish and German.

The ministry’s director-general Erez Halfon told Haaretz that over a million people who speak a second language are being targeted in a recruiting drive that will then direct the volunteers to web sites deemed “problematic.” Presumably their mission would be to troll comment boards and forums with pro-Zionist arguments, a public relations stunt that we have seen employed by other entities such as Monsanto and more recently Centcom and the U.S. Air Force.

Such ongoing efforts to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror are well documented.

CENTCOM has programs underway to infiltrate blogs and message boards to ensure people, “have the opportunity to read positive stories,”presumably about how Iraq is a wonderful liberated democracy and the war on terror really is about protecting Americans from Al-CIAda.

In May 2008, it was revealed that the Pentagon was expanding “Information Operations” on the Internet with purposefully set up foreign news websites, designed to look like independent media sources but in reality carrying direct military propaganda.

More recently the New York Times published an expose on privately hired operatives who have been appearing on all major US news networks promoting the interests and operations of the Pentagon and generating favorable news coverage of the Bush administration while posing as independent military analysts.

This operation was formally announced In 2006 when the Pentagon set up a unit to “better promote its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet”.
Again, the Pentagon said the move would boost its ability to counter “inaccurate” news stories and exploit new media.

Just over a week ago, the US Air Force announced a “counter-blog” response plan aimed at fielding and reacting to material from bloggers who have “negative opinions about the US government and the Air Force.”

The plan, created by the public affairs arm of the Air Force, includes a detailed twelve-point “counter blogging” flow-chart that dictates how officers should tackle what are described as “trolls,” “ragers,” and “misguided” online writers.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

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Operation Mockingbird

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s. The existence of this operation was made public during the Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976).

The activities, extent and even the name of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first identified as Mockingbird in Deborah Davis’ 1979 expose, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. But Davis’ book, alleging that the media had been recruited (and infiltrated) by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was itself controversial and has since been shown to have had a number of erroneous assertions.^[1] More evidence of Mockingbird’s existence emerged in the 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, by convicted Watergate “plumber” E. Howard Hunt.

Contents  [hide] 1 History 1.1 Part of the Directorate of Plans 1.2 Guatemala 1.3 First exposure 1.4 Church Committee investigations 1.5 “Family Jewels” Report 2 See also 3 Further reading 4 Notes 5 External links

[edit]History

In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionageand counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”^[2]

Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great; “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”^[3]

In 1951, Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s.^[4] According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird’s “principal operative”.^[5]

In 1977, Rolling Stone alleged that one of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone Magazine to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett(Chattanooga Times).^[6] According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.^[7]

After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known left-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times),Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).^[6]

The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers. Frank Wisner was constantly looking for ways to help convince the public of the dangers of communism. In 1954, Wisner arranged for the funding of the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the animated allegory based on the book written by George Orwell.^[8]

According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, “some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts”. Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran (See: Operation Ajax) andGuatemala (See: Operation PBSUCCESS).^[9]

Thomas Braden, head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in these events:

“If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he’s working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody… There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war…. It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first. Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target—that was one of the activities in which the communists spent the most money.”^[10]

[edit]Part of the Directorate of Plans

In August 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP). Frank Wisner became head of this new organization and Richard Helms became his chief of operations. Mockingbird was now the responsibility of the DPP.^[11]

J. Edgar Hoover became jealous of the CIA’s growing power. He described the OPC as “Wisner’s gang of weirdos” and began carrying out investigations into their past. It did not take him long to discover that some of them had been active in left-wing politics in the 1930s. This information was passed to Joseph McCarthy who started making attacks on members of the OPC. Hoover also gave McCarthy details of an affair that Frank Wisner had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Hoover claimed that Caradja was a Soviet agent.^[12]

Joseph McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA as being security risks. McCarthy claimed that the CIA was a “sinkhole of communists“, and claimed he intended to root out a hundred of them. One of his first targets was Cord Meyer, who was still working for Operation Mockingbird. In August, 1953, Richard Helms, Wisner’s deputy at the OPC, told Meyer that Joseph McCarthy had accused him of being a communist. The Federal Bureau of Investigation added credibility to the accusation by announcing it was unwilling to give Meyer “security clearance”. However, the FBI refused to explain what evidence they had against Meyer. Allen W. Dulles and Frank Wisner both came to his defense and refused to permit an FBI interrogation of Meyer.^[13]

Joseph McCarthy did not realize what he was taking on. Wisner unleashed Mockingbird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson, Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage orchestrated by Wisner.^[14]

[edit]Guatemala

Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. People like Henry Luce were able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz. Allen W. Dulles was even able to keep left-wing journalists from travelling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times.^[15]

Even in the wake of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ 1952 presidential campaign pledge to “roll back the Iron Curtain“, American covert action operations came under scrutiny almost as soon as Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in 1953. He soon set up an evaluation operation called Solarium, which had three committees playing analytical games to see which plans of action should be continued. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the 5412 Committee in order to keep more of a check on the CIA’s covert activities. The committee (also called theSpecial Group) included the CIA director, the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defence and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were “proper” and in the national interest. It was also decided to include Richard B. Russell, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of “plausible deniability” planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee.

Eisenhower became concerned about CIA covert activities and in 1956 appointed David K. E. Bruce as a member of the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities(PBCFIA). Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA. It was presented to Eisenhower on 20 December 1956. Bruce argued that the CIA’s covert actions were “responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today.” Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: “what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office.”^[16]

After Richard Bissell lost his post as Director of Plans in 1962, Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. According to Evan Thomas (The Very Best Men) Barnes planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.

[edit]First exposure

In 1964, Random House published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. The book exposed the role the CIA was playing in foreign policy. This included the CIA coups inGuatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS) and Iran (Operation Ajax) and the Bay of Pigs operation. It also revealed the CIA’s attempts to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam. The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.^[2]

John McCone, the new director of the CIA, also attempted to stop Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt atcensorship failed and NBC went ahead and broadcast this critical documentary.

In June, 1965, Desmond FitzGerald was appointed as head of the Directorate for Plans. He now took charge of Mockingbird. At the end of 1966 FitzGerald found out that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association.^[17] FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”^[18]

This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop Ramparts publishing this story in March 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of theNational Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America. It named Cord Meyer as a key figure in this campaign. This included the funding of the literary journal Encounter.^[10]

In May 1967, Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral’”, in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress. As he pointed out in the article: “In the early 1950s, when thecold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare.”^[19]

Meyer’s role in Operation Mockingbird was further exposed in 1972 when he was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. The book was highly critical of the CIA’s dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia. The publisher, who leaked the story, had been a former colleague of Meyer’s when he was a liberal activist after the war.^[20]

[edit]Church Committee investigations

Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the Congress report published in 1976:

“The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”

Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.^[21]

In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” However, he added that the CIA would continue to “welcome” the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.^[22]

[edit]“Family Jewels” Report

According to the “Family Jewels” report, released by the National Security Archive on June 26, 2007, during the period from March 12, 1963 and June 15, 1963, the CIA installed telephone taps on two Washington-based news reporters.

[edit]See also

• Cord Meyer
• Judith Miller
• James Risen
• Mighty Wurlitzer
• Propaganda in the United States
• Robertson Panel

[edit]Further reading

• Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post by Deborah Davis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. This book makes many claims about Katherine Graham, then owner of the Washington Post, and her cooperation with Operation Mockingbird.

[edit]Notes

1. ^ Davis asserts that Deep Throat was Richard Ober, rather than Mark Felt, as has since been revealed
2. ^ ^a b David Wise and Thomas Ross (1964). Invisible Government.
3. ^ Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. pp. 137–138.
4. ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 42–59.
5. ^ Deborah Davis (1979). Katharine the Great. pp. 226.
6. ^ ^a b Carl Bernstein (20 October 1977). “CIA and the Media”. Rolling Stone Magazine.
7. ^ Nina Burleigh (1998). A Very Private Woman. pp. 118.
8. ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 33.
9. ^ Alex Constantine (2000). Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA.
10. ^ ^a b Thomas Braden, interview included in the Granada Television program, World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA. 1975.
11. ^ John Ranelagh (1986). The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. pp. 198–202.
12. ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 98–106.
13. ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 60–84.
14. ^ Jack Anderson (1979). Confessions of a Muckraker. pp. 208–236.
15. ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 117.
16. ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 148–150.
17. ^ Cord Meyer (1980). Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA. pp. 86–89.
18. ^ Evan Thomas (1995). The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA. pp. 330.
19. ^ Thomas Braden (20 May 1967). “I’m Glad the CIA is ‘Immoral’”. Saturday Evening Post.
20. ^ Nina Burleigh (1998). A Very Private Woman. pp. 105.
21. ^ Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. April 1976. pp. 191–201.
22. ^ Mary Louise (2003). Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation.

[edit]External links

• Carl Bernsten’s 1977 article for Rolling Stone “The Cia and the Media”
• CIA “Family Jewels” Report
• Alex Constantine: The CIA’s Project MOCKINGBIRD: Ongoing Covert Control of the Media

Categories: Central Intelligence Agency operations | Politics of the United States | American media | Propaganda in the United States

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The video was produced by actress Demi Moore for the MySpace Presidential Pledge project, and features a gaggle of highly annoying actors, singers and other patent phonies such as Sean P. “Diddy” Combs, Courtney Cox Arquette and Ashton Kutcher.

“The Presidential Pledge is a platform for people across the nation and throughout the world to make a first person commitment of service to our new President, articulating a specific intent or action to become an agent of positive change,” said Kutcher.

In the video, Sean P. “Diddy” Combs pledges to “turn the lights off,” presumably to help Obama combat “global warming” as America freezes under record low temperatures, while actor Jason Bateman promises to “flush only after a deuce never a single” and another celebrity states his pledge to “sell my obnoxious car and drive a hybrid”. Red Hot Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama”.

At the end of the clip, in perhaps the creepiest moment, Moore and Kutcher pledge to “be a servant to our President” as the shot pans out to show all the actors echoing a cult-like mantra, “because together we can, together we are and together we will be the change that we see,” as the shot morphs into the now familiar Marxist motif 1984-style image of Obama.

Several respondents to the video noted that the sentiments expressed were at best misguided and at worst “creepy,” “sick” and “cult-like”.

Forgive my skepticism, but millionaire celebrities vacuously pledging to “plant 500 trees” when the American economy teeters on the brink of a depression that Obama’s stated policies for combating “global warming” will only make worse just doesn’t inspire me at all.

Furthermore, since when were the American people supposed to swear allegiance and pledge “service” to a President? The U.S. Constitution, that piece of paper that Obama will swear to defend and protect later today, states quite clearly that elected representatives are supposed to act in “service” of the people’s best interests, not the other way around.

Of course, the most disturbing aspect to all this cult-like messiah complex and “service” of government is Barack Obama’s intention to take this notion of “service,” which is embraced by many well-meaning but naive people, and turn it against the American middle class in the form of Stasi-like informants spying on those that choose not to sacrifice their freedom and prosperity in the name of saving the planet from the menace of a problem wholly concocted and exploited by the very elite that Obama represents.

Indeed, the woman overseeing Obama’s climate agenda, Carol Browner, is a card-carrying member of Socialist International, an organization that has resolved to use the threat of global warming as a means to facilitate the creation of a system of global government.

How many of Obama’s promised “national civilian security force,” a cadre we are guaranteed will be as strong or stronger than the U.S. Army, will make the “pledge” to spy on their neighbors for enviro-crimes and report them to the local green commissariat?

Perhaps these celebrities should spend less time worrying about when its morally right to flush the toilet and more time asking Obama and Biden about their “pledge” to protect Bush administration war criminals from prosecution.

Perhaps they should concern themselves more with Obama’s “pledge” to do nothing to stop Israel’s incessant and barbarian slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza.

That really would be of “service,” but only to the American people, humanity in general, and future generations, and not to the Obama government’s domestic political agenda.

Watch the video clip below.

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

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Wikipedia offers people concerned about this possible deletion the ability to edit the page. “You may remove this message if you improve the article or otherwise object to deletion for any reason. To avoid confusion, it helps to explain why you object to the deletion, either in the edit summary or on the talk page. If this template is removed, it should not be replaced.”

In response, an editor interested in retaining the page added references. Soon after the references were added, however, somebody went on the page and removed them, according to a comment.

	Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales offers excuses for the CIA’s Intellipedia spin-off.

Obviously, certain Wikipedia editors are determined to have the page removed and will engage in vandalism in order to have this happen within the five day period announced. Considering the history and allegations leveled at Wikipedia, this should not come as a surprise.

In 2007, Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith developed a software tool that revealed the identities of organizations that edit Wikipedia entries (see Wikipedia ’shows CIA page edits,’ BBC, August 15, 2007). The software revealed editorial changes made by the CIA, the FBI, Diebold, the Democratic Party and the Vatican.

“The Democratic and Republican parties, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institute of Health have also made their fair share of edits. As far as corporations go, Diebold, Amgen, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Apple, and Exxon Mobil have all made changes. Not to be outdone, the news agencies of Fox News, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera have also participated,” writes Manila Ryce.

“According to clues accumulated by ordinary citizens around the world, it could be that the CIA and other intelligence agencies are riding the information wave and planting disinformation on Wikipedia,” explains Ludwig De Braeckeleer. “The fact that most Internet search engines, such as Google, give Wikipedia articles top ranking only raises the stakes to a higher level.”

After independent UK journalist and columnist Neil Clark claimed his Wikipedia entry was “consistently maliciously edited” after he critically reviewed a pro-war book penned by Oliver Kamm writing for the Daily Telegraph, the Byzantine Blog wrote that “most internet users who consider Wikipedia a reliable source of information on a whole range of issues, including history and politics, are entirely unaware of” the claim “that Wikipedia is infiltrated by the Western secret services which use it to manipulate truth and prevent the inconvenient facts reaching the wider public, by planting their governments’ official versions of events through Wiki articles.”

And, while the official mainstream media is still filled with praises for the highly dubious Wikiality, independent sources have confirmed Wikipedia is neither “open”, nor “egalitarian”, and certainly not “free”. Unless one thinks CIA and MI5 are veritable fountains of unvarnished, solid-as-gold truths, generously shared with the rest of world for no other purpose but to inform, educate and enlighten the slumbering masses.

Before deciding to rely on Wikipedia as a source of information for serious research on any political subject and most other issues (except for, say, tapeworms and sessile leaves), one would be well advised to heed the warning of founder Jimmy Wales, who personally instructed users not to cite Wikipedia as a source.

Uri Dowbenko is a little more to the point: “Claiming to be a ‘free online encyclopedia,’ Wikipedia is actually a shill for corporate and other internet disinformation, just as AP, also known as Associated Propaganda (or Press), is the Media Cartel’s syndicator of choice, spreading false ‘nooz’ in hometown papers throughout America,” writes Dowbenko. “Wikipedia is the undisputed kudzu weed of the Internet. Just wait till it’s revealed that Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia is an NSA-CIA-Pentagon PsyOps scam.”

As of this writing, there is no definitive evidence Wikipedia is associated with the CIA or other intelligence agencies. However, other prominent internet information corporations have a well-defined association with the spook world. For instance, Robert David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer and a former clandestine services case officer with the CIA, told Alex Jones in 2006 that “Google took money from the CIA when it was poor and it was starting up” and the search engine company is “in bed” with the CIA. “Let me say very explicitly - their contact at the CIA is named Dr. Rick Steinheiser, he’s in the Office of Research and Development,” said Steele.

In 2008, Steve Watson wrote that Google is in the business of providing the search features for a private Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia. “Google is selling storage and data searching equipment to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies, who have come together to build a huge internal government intranet,” Watson reported.

Like Wikipedia, the CIA’s platform is based on the open-source MediaWiki software.

Wikipedia’s Bilderberg entry may be of interest to the CIA considering former CIA director John M. Deutch is a member, according to the entry now up Wikipedia’s chopping block. Walter Bedell Smith, a former CIA director, and Cord Meyer, a former CIA official, are also listed as members.

Again, there is no definitive evidence the CIA is complicit in the recent vandalism of the Bilderberg entry on Wikipedia, however the fact Virgil Griffith’s software caught the agency in the act of editing entries is highly suspicious, to say the least.

Finally, if Wikipedia does indeed delete the entry in question, we have replicated it herefor the sake of posterity.

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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

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Now Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat, wants to muzzle “right-wing” talk radio. “I think the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated,” Hinchey told CNNRadio,Politico reports. The Democrat said he would have the now dormant doctrine attached to a bill he plans to introduce later this year overhauling radio and TV ownership laws.

	Former president Bill Clinton recently added his voice to Democrat calls to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine.

According to Hinchey, talk radio is unfair. In other words, due to market dynamics — what people listen to — there are few Democrats and “progressives” on the dial and it is up to the government to introduce “balance” through legislation.

During the third National Media Reform Conference was held in Memphis, Tennessee, sponsored by the globalist Soros foundation,Hinchey declared that “neo-fascist” and “neo-con” talk show hosts had helped create the national climate that led to the invasion of Iraq. Hinchey neglected to mention that the corporate media, including the “liberal” New York Times, has also agitated in favor of an invasion of Iraq. It was a full-court press not limited to neocons and Bush supporters. In fact, the neocon operative Judith Miller was rewarded for her pro-invasion propaganda pieces published in the New York Times — last October, she was hired by Fox News.

Hinchey joins Democrat senators Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Tom Harkin of Iowa who have called for “hearings” on talk radio. It should be noted that Stabenow’s husband, Tom Athans, is and has been an executive at several “liberal” radio talk groups.

Former president Bill Clinton recently added his voice to Democrat calls to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine. During an interview with “liberal” talk show host Mario Solis-Marich, Clinton said the government should impose “more balance in the programs or have some opportunity for people to offer countervailing opinions,” according to NewsBusters.

Now that Democrats are calling for the reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine and “hearings” into talk radio, lib talk show radio hosts are emboldened. On February 10, former Air America radio talk show host Mike Malloy said the “real internal terrorists are the Republicans” and “Rush Limbaugh is a bigger threat to this country than Osama bin Laden. He’s a bigger threat than anybody that the CIA can invent. He’s a bigger threat than any terrorist that ever leveled its sights against the United States, Limbaugh is, so why isn’t he arrested and sentenced for treason?”

Limbaugh, of course, is not of the same caliber as the late CIA operative Osama bin Laden. He is, however, part of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird media control program and the false right-left paradigm designed to render ineffective any meaningful opposition to the government and the global elite.

Democrats may eventually impose government control of the airwaves. However, such control will not significantly muzzle “terrorists” such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or multinational communications corporations. Instead, the Democrat censorship agenda will run smaller independent broadcasters out of business while the phony right-left noise machine will continue its propaganda campaign engineered to derail sincere opposition.

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Kurt Nimmo
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