Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent
What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?
After all, it’s happening all over the world.
Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.
In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.
In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”
These government-imposed communications shutdowns serve to not only isolate, terrorize and control the populace, but also underscore the citizenry’s lack of freedom in the face of the government’s limitless power.
Yet as University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye explains, these kill switches are no longer exclusive to despotic regimes. They have “migrated into a toolbox for governments that actually do have the rule of law.”
This is what digital authoritarianism looks like in a technological age.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
For those who insist that it can’t happen here, it can and it has.
In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels, reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone.
In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked—again, same rationale.
And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down, this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man.
With shutdowns becoming harder to detect, who’s to say it’s not still happening?
Although an internet kill switch is broadly understood to be a complete internet shutdown, it can also include a broad range of restrictions such as content blocking, throttling, filtering, complete shutdowns, and cable cutting.
As Global Risk Intel explains:
Content blocking is a relatively moderate method that blocks access to a list of selected websites or applications. When users access these sites and apps, they receive notifications that the server could not be found or that access was denied by the network administrator. A more subtle method is throttling. Authorities decrease the bandwidth to slow down the speed at which specific websites can be accessed. A slow internet connection discourages users to connect to certain websites and does not arouse immediate suspicion. Users may assume that connection service is slow but may not conclude that this circumstance was authorized by the government. Filtering is another tool to censor targeted content and erases specific messages and terms that the government does not approve of.
How often do most people, experiencing server errors and slow internet speeds, chalk it up to poor service? Who would suspect the government of being behind server errors and slow internet speeds?
Then again, this is the same government that has subjected us to all manner of encroachments on our freedoms (lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, over-criminalization, shadow banning, etc.) in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, preserve the integrity of elections, and combat disinformation.
These tactics have become the tools of domination and oppression in an internet-dependent age.
It really doesn’t matter what the justifications are for such lockdowns. No matter the rationale, the end result is the same: an expansion of government power in direct proportion to the government’s oppression of the citizenry.
In this age of manufactured crises, emergency powers and technofascism, the government already has the know-how, the technology and the authority.
Now all it needs is the “right” crisis to flip the kill switch.
This particular kill switch can be traced back to the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act empowers the president to suspend wireless radio and phone services “if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense” during a time of “war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States.”
That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
Given the government’s penchant for weaponizing one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security, it’s only a matter of time before this particular emergency power to shut down the internet is activated.
Then again, an all-out communications blackout is just a more extreme version of the technocensorship that we’ve already been experiencing at the hands of the government and its corporate allies.
In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the police state.
Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these censors are laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, whatever the reason might be, will at some point in the future be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.
By the time you add AI technologies, social credit systems, and wall-to-wall surveillance into the mix, you don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.
Meet the Thought Police
So, my trial for thoughtcrimes in New Normal Germany takes place next Tuesday, January 23rd. It will likely be a one-day affair. It’s open to the public, so, if you’re in Berlin, you can come and watch at the Berlin District Court, Turmstraße 91, Room 371. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon.
Yes, that’s right, the German authorities are actually putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes. I stand accused of criminal tweeting because I mocked the New Normal German authorities and pointed out one of their many lies. Here are the two thoughtcrime Tweets at issue.
The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, who, believe it or not, is still the Health Minister of Germany. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.”
The image is from the cover art of my book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), which was banned in Germany by Amazon, Inc. two days after I tweeted those Tweets … which was also when the German authorities launched the criminal investigation that led to my prosecution and instructed Twitter to censor the Tweets.
Let me back up a bit, and tell you the whole story.
What happened is, I tweeted those two Tweets, and they came to the attention of the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter (“Hessen 3C”), a department of another department of the Interior Ministry of the Federal State of Hesse. The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter then reported my Tweets to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, the Bundeskriminalamt, which launched a criminal investigation of me.
Also, the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter instructed Twitter to censor my two Tweets, which Twitter did, and sent me this notice on August 30, 2022.
One day earlier, on August 29, Amazon had banned my book in Germany. I don’t have hard evidence of communication between the German authorities and Amazon yet, but … well, it’s obvious what happened, isn’t it?
The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter is an official “partner” of the German “National Cyber Defense Center” (Cyber-AZ), based in Bonn, which, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office website, “is not an independent authority, but represents a common, cross-agency and cross-institutional platform.” Cyber-AZ was founded in 2011 as part of the implementation of the Federal Government’s Cyber Security Strategy (CSS).
The “core authorities” of Cyber-AZ are as follows:
- Federal Office for the Military Shielding Service
- Federal Criminal Police Office
- Federal Office for Information Security
- Federal Office of the Constitution Protection
- Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance
- Bundeswehr command Cyber Cyberand Information Space
- Federal Police
- Federal Intelligence Service
The Federal Office of the Constitution Protection (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) is essentially the German FBI. And the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) is … well, just what it sounds like. Here’s a little tidbit from the BfV website …
[The BfV’s] main tasks are to monitor and analyse anti-constitutional activities by right- and left-wing extremists and extremist foreigners in Germany and to prevent espionage activities by other countries … The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution works closely with its counterparts at state level and with the other German intelligence services (i.e., the Federal Intelligence Service and Military Counterintelligence Service) as necessary.
This is the formidable “security” apparatus that has been brought to bear against my Tweets, which allegedly threaten the German constitution by pointing out the German government’s lies about masks and mocking the Minister of Health.
Look, I know what you’re probably thinking, that is, if you’re one of my non-German readers. You’re thinking this Orwellian apparatus is uniquely German and has nothing to do with you. And, OK, you kind of have a point, and you don’t. The structures in Germany and the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, are different, but the game is the same. If you don’t believe me, I suggest you read up on the reporting of this story by Matt Taibbi at Racket News, and Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag at Public (yes, I am persona non grata at Public, but that has nothing to do with the value of their work).
Matt, Mike, and Alex have mostly reported on what Mike dubbed the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” i.e., the US “Thought Police” apparatus, which is natural, as they’re writing for an American audience. But this is not just an American story. And it isn’t a story about Red/Blue politics. And it isn’t a story about “Cultural Marxism,” or “Wokeness,” or “Libtards,” or other such distractions. It’s a story about the evolution of the global ideological/power system that came into being about 30 years ago, and that is gradually going totalitarian on us.
I’ve been covering this story for many years now, satirically and sometimes not so satirically. I’m not going to reiterate all that here. You can read my essays on my blog and my Substack (that is, until Substack is destroyed, like Parler), or you can read my books, unless you live here in Germany. The point is, the global-capitalist system that controls the entire planet we live on is going totalitarian on us, conducting a global “clear-and-hold” operation, cracking down on internal resistance — any and all forms of internal resistance — and it wants us to know this is what it is doing. The system — no, not a conspiracy of bad guys — the system has been broadcasting this message, loud and clear, for a number of years.
The message is, “We, The Powers That Be, are done playing grab-ass. Get in line. Shut the fuck up and follow orders, or we will rain All Holy Hell down on you.” The message is, “Screw Your Freedom!” The message is, “Screw Your Democratic Rights! Screw the Rule of Law! This is the New Normal! We will do whatever we fucking want, and there is nothing you can do about it.”
If you’re having trouble hearing the message, you might want to have a look at this incredibly long thread I compiled, for some reason, in March and April of 2020 …
Or maybe just ask the people in Gaza …
… I think they’re probably getting the message.
Or ask Julian Assange, or Donald Trump, or anyone else that The Powers That Be have decided they need to make an example of … yes, even a little fish like me.
Anyway, I’ll be writing more about that, all that global-capitalist totalitarian stuff, perhaps in my German prison cell. According to the original “Order of Punishment” (I kid you not, that’s what it is called), I was sentenced to 60 days in jail or a fine of 3,600 Euros, but now, because I demanded a trial, the judge can come up with a whole new sentence.
We’ll see how things play out next Tuesday.
Whatever happens, one thing I am looking forward to at my trial is hearing the Berlin State Prosecutor explain how what I did in my Tweets (i.e., displaying a swastika for one of the purposes expressly allowed in Germany) was a “crime,” but when German newspapers do exactly the same thing, which they frequently do, the exceptions to the swastika-ban apply.
See, that’s the funny thing about global-capitalist totalitarianism … the authorities can’t go openly fascist. They are forced to at least attempt to appear to pay lip service to democratic principles, and the rule of law, and all that good stuff, which is why they so often sound like idiots who can’t even mount a coherent argument or make an intelligible public statement.
OK, I need to go read some German legalese.
Seriously, though, if you are in Berlin and have nothing better to do next Tuesday, come on down to the Berlin District Court and meet some of the German Thought Police in person. If things go smoothly, perhaps we can all go out and get a coffee afterwards. And if not … well, maybe bring me a carton of cigarettes and a jar of Vaseline.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. Read other articles by C.J..
No comments:
Post a Comment