Crimes solved by bots, naysayers framed by technology, police watching our pcs and deserting our streets, gullible citizens accepting flimsy narratives, and a corporate media consensus suppressing dissent. If this is what you want, then congratulations: the project is well under way…..and gathering speed.
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When the British police élite asserted recently that, in future, they would only be recruiting from the graduate pool, I (along with many others) thought it was a hoot given the stage and satire stereotype of bobbies with big feet saying “Nar then, nar then, whassa goin’ on ‘ere, you’re nicked chummy”. But I quickly revised my view in the light of a long conversation with two recently retired senior cops.
The government class’s public rationale for Bright Bobbies is that they’re not going to be bobbies as such, but experts in techno, cyber and complex fraud, given that most crime is either virtual, treasonous or professional. Setting aside the fact that this isn’t true (there’s a big difference between recorded crime and reality) on the basis of this apparent attempt to stop ‘invisible’ crime, the Home Office approved decision has barely caused a ripple. But both circumstantial and official evidence is beginning to emerge that the entire role of “civil” policing is about to be not so much changed as abandoned.
The big winners in that change are going to be online social media, retail distributors, surveillance cameras and the brokers who variously collect, analyse and then market the data to those who want – equally variously – to sell, snoop, change and monitor. This is an excerpt from a rivetting US piece, written by a Private Eye skilled in modern detection:
‘I had a classic case that shows just how traceable we all now are. There was a dead body, a possible murder victim, but no direct evidence: no witnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon found. In San Francisco’s East Bay, however, as in most big American cities, there are so many surveillance cameras mounted on mom-and-pop stores, people’s houses, bars, cafes, hospitals, toll bridges, tunnels, even in parks, that the police can collect enough video, block by block, to effectively map a suspect driving around Oakland for hours before hitting the freeway and heading out to dump a body, just as the defendant in my case did……The particular suspect I have in mind drove his victim’s car across a bridge, where cameras videotaped the license plate but couldn’t see inside the car; nor, he must have assumed, could anyone record him on the deserted road he finally reached where he was undoubtedly confident that he was safe. What he didn’t notice was the CALFIRE video camera placed on that very road to monitor for brush fires. It caught a car’s headlights matching his on its way to the site he had chosen to dump the body.’
To the blindly gullible, this looks like total good news: every murderer will now be caught – hurrah! But there are three very malign elements in all this:
- Who needs cops on the beat when tech can do all this?
- What if you’re not a murderer, but the enemy of a controlling corporate State that uses hitech and graduate analysis to make usurpation of its totalitarian dictatorship virtually impossible?
- Hitech also makes mistakes, but juries believe in it 100% – despite all the mass of evidence that it is nowhere near infallible.
Our informant the Private Eye again:
‘In our world of the unforgotten, tech is seen as a wonder of wonders. Juries love tech. Many jurors think tech is simply science and so beyond disbelief. As a result, they tend to react badly when experts are called as defense witnesses to disabuse them of their belief in tech’s magic powers: that, for instance, cellphone calls don’t always pinpoint exactly where someone was when he or she made a call. If too many signals are coming in to the closest tower to a cell phone, a suspect’s calls may be rerouted to a more distant tower. Similarly, the FBI’s computerized fingerprint index often makes mistakes in its matches, as do police labs when it comes to DNA samples.’
This is worrying, but not the only reason to fear miscarriages of justice: there is another side to hitech, and that is its potential for the falsification of visual evidence in a deliberate attempt to frame someone. Digital film special effects can be inflicted upon a video record, and then copied back onto surveillance camera video before being “discovered” by investigators.
If there are no physical, civil policemen in cars or walking the beat, if wonky machines can find us guilty, if the rule of Law can be perverted so easily by political and corporate interests, then the cold, merciless and increasingly hidden face of the State will leave citizens not just worried about who elected officials work for: it will leave all of us except those in the tiny oligarchy defenceless against sociopathy in public life.
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Look at how easily large portions of the British public have accepted minimal evidence of Russian involvement in the Skripal case as guilt established beyond a shadow of a doubt. At the moment, only a few higher-quality online commentators have a handle on the huge holes in Boris Johnson’s “case” against Russian agents (all unnamed), Vladimir Putin (a man with no credible motive) and Basshar Assad (a man with no need to drop chemical weapons on his own people). But a giant leap from the symptoms of two spies of dubious loyalty in Salisbury led to the bombing of Syrian ammo dumps and airfields – note absence of chemwarfare factories to hit – by three NATO countries without asking any constitutional authorities in the three aggressor States for permission so to do…least of all The People.
Now the new UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt not only has penultimate responsibility for getting a “deal” from the EU on Brexit, his feet are pounding heavily upon the track of anti-Russian sanctions pummeled by Johnson: Hunt is doing the rounds of EU capitals, calling for deeper economic penalties against “Russian plots” to wipe out double-agents.
The journalist with the best credentials to examine this case continues to point up how a dangerously small media club has been disgracefully complicit in the accusations. This week, Craig Murray turned his attention towards the BBC, which has recently deflected an FoI request about its “coverage” of the Skripal Case. Rightly pointing out that the Beeb’s refusal to comply with the request is utterly fraudulent, Murray’s has sent an email to the journalist most directly involved, Mark Urban, as follows:
Dear Mark,
As you may know, I am a journalist working in alternative media, a member of the NUJ, as well as a former British Ambassador. I am researching the Skripal case.
I wish to ask you the following questions.
1) When the Skripals were first poisoned, it was the largest news story in the entire World and you were uniquely positioned having held several meetings with Sergei Skripal the previous year. Yet faced with what should have been a massive career break, you withheld that unique information on a major story from the public for four months. Why?
2) You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?
3) When you met Skripal in Salisbury, was Miller present all or part of the time, or did you meet Miller separately?
4) Was the BBC aware of your meetings with Miller and/or Skripal at the time?
5) When, four months later, you told the world about your meetings with Skripal after the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you said you had met him to research a book. Yet the only forthcoming book by you advertised is on the Skripal attack. What was the subject of your discussions with Skripal?
6) Pablo Miller worked for Orbis Intelligence. Do you know if Miller contributed to the Christopher Steele dossier on Trump/Russia?
7) Did you discuss the Trump dossier with Skripal and/or Miller?
8) Do you know whether Skripal contributed to the Trump dossier?
9) In your Newsnight piece following the Rowley/Sturgess incident, you stated that security service sources had told you that Yulia Skripal’s telephone may have been bugged. Since January 2017, how many security service briefings or discussions have you had on any of the matters above?
I look forward to hearing from you.’
Far be it from me to insert words into what’s written between the lines of this email, but it is very hard to read it and not conclude that Mr Murray is suggesting a link between MI6 and Urban, accusing Urban of censoring vital Skripal information, and questioning his objectivity as a BBC journalist. Underlying the message is a suspicion that, given his military track-record and intelligence connections, Mark Urban has perhaps forgotten who pays his salary.
Either way, ever since David Cameron’s quiet pro-HSBC coup against what the BBC used to stand for, bullying by both him, Blair, Campbell, Mandelson et al over the last fifteen years has brought the Beeb perilously close to being nothing more than a mouthpiece for the neocon foreign policy élite, and in turn (at a lower level) an uncritical promoter of the pc belief system affected by the British Establishment.
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We arrive at the familiar prerequisites for citizen enslavement: an unrepresentative clique in power, an equally unrepresentative faction in opposition, the strengthening of the grip a technocentric surveillance State has upon well-meaning contrarians, a mass of under 30s laargely schooled in acceptance education, and a tiny cabal running a media consensus that favours a stagnant status quo in which little is allowed to change.
The only metamorphosis on the cards today is the transformation of an apolitical civil police force into a politicised State police entity that is shaping up to become a sort of Gestapo on steroids.
Laugh if you want. Throw scorn upon the very idea. But by so doing, you are an active catalyst for the realisation of an amoral, uncompassionate and violently repressive world.
(GILMAR August 29, i have been of the opinion for some 40 years that before the end of this century there will be dictatorship in the UK).
“The decline in democracy started in the early ’70s as a new breed of politicians were molded on the freedom our war heroes fought and died for. Today the dictatorial democracy is well embedded in parliament. Unless the now muted, watered down British Citizens arises from the politically created mire politicians, bankers, big industrialists and foreign investors have created there is little, (no), hope of a return to being the Great Brittan of yesteryear.
The British fighting spirit of the war years and the re-building years was incredible. The new bread of MPs in all parties, and their bankers/financiers, and now the PC brigade disregard the mere “plebs” (us), and have hacked away at that spirit and crushed it beyond all recognition. – Gilmar, we will not have to wait till the end of this century for dictatorship to be the only choice. its on the doorstep now!
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I never believed a word of the Skripal case from the moment it “happened”. It’s just too pat. Naturally the beasts “de jour”, the Russians were involved merely by virtue of the agent being used was Novichuk. How would Porton Down (conveniently close) know it was Novichuk? If they had a sample to compare it against then surely they could reproduce it, and if they could do that,. . . . .
Secondly Skripal was held in custody by the Russians for being a spy. As is the normal convention one country swaps their spies for their enemies spies. Its been going on for ages. For this to continue, and it will, it makes absolutely no sense whatsovever for the Russians to bump him off, as nobody will ever do business with them in this vein again.
The Russians are a lot of things, but they do not have a monopoly on being nasty, Similarly they are not serially incompetent, so if they were to bump off Skripal, then they would have made sure it happened and used a method that did not tie the death to them, that surely is a given.
Lastly Novichuk is fatal, yet Skripal and his daughter survived exposure to it. So either it wasn’t Novichuk, and thus no connection to the Russians, or they were never exposed to in the first place.
All in all it’s an absolute crock of shite.
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@ Pete Fairhurst
Just for the laughs take a butchers at this, perhaps show it to your son.
YouTube: SCRIPT Top ten Staged Media Events!
Much fun, particularly Ron Paul.
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Perhaps the government’s intention to recruit from the graduate class is not only about the level of education but the class of people employed. Generally speaking a university education puts the graduate in the middle classes; and a police force with no working classes, only middle class achievers who want to achieve more, will be capable of doing unpleasant things to “the lower orders” when the dictatorship no longer hides its intent and puts on the jackboots.
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The removal of police from our streets is a weapon the Deep State will use to undermine or overthrow a Government that attempts to alter policy on the Middle East and Russia, expenditure on arms and nuclear weapons or the banks. Any such attempt will be followed by widespread rioting and looting in our major cities in an attempt to deflect the government from its intended reforms.
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Completely agree that Mark Urban is a state asset. That said, his book ”The Edge” is well worth a read about how the US has squandered its military dominance and how the Russians, for example, have improved their armed forces with astute but economical development.
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RB0161 – net neutrality is already under threat. Google Maps/streetview now brings up commercial addresses nearby when you try to search for a particular address, as I discovered recently whilst doing family tree research online. Have you ever tried telling GoogleMaps that you’re NOT looking for a hotel but an ancestor’s childhood home? Argh!!
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All of this will be familiar to readers of dystopian fiction; but it is extremely worrying that life is beginning to imitate art in this particular way. The most important question then, is: “What can we do about it?” (We bring the average, ordinary law-abiding citizen)
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Many of David Icke’s theories are, well words fail me, but he has been right on this one for decades. We have been sleepwalking into a dystopia planned long ago.
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oops – forgot to mention – I haven’t received the delivery – sorry
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For a laugh – this morning – I received an email from amazon with the following detailed information – “Your package was probably delivered, as we expected it to arrive by now” – this is how much they care ….. ;0)
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A few months back I was talking to my 30 year old son about the ludicrous nature of the Skripal narrative. We had both followed Craig Murray’s eloquent analysis that blew BoJo, and his conspiracy theories, totally out of the water.
I was moaning about the coordinated nature of the mainstream media, from both political wings. The media all repeated Bojos obvious nonsense as though it was fact. There was minimal criticism or questioning. There was no real journalism anywhere in the mainstream, only from independents like John and Craig.
In my disgust I asked my son some rhetorical questions:
Why do so many people believe such obvious guff?
How come more people can’t see through the charade?
He answered immediately:
Most people of my generation don’t read content anymore dad. They just read the headlines. They don’t do detail. They are too busy skimming their social media.
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Well, I did warn you before the Brexit referendum that all the flag-waving was a cover for a coup by the Americans who would then strangle the life out of our democracy and EU freedoms. You assured us, however, that once we were ‘free’ of the EU we would be able to vote out a government we did not like. This is all very well in principle but in practice, we can see from the dirty tricks against Jeremy Corbyn by the American-controlled broadcast media and press that democracy is easily stifled.
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Tom – with respect, I think you need to pay more attention the the right hand column of The Slog, where there is an illustration showing the EU & US flags with a large word in white saying ‘NO’. I think there just might be a clue in that visual you haven’t as yet decoded. Give it some thought. JW
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Whilst regrettably you are right, nothing will be said until it’s too late, as usual. But of course the authorities will use the familiar bogeymen of terrorists and paedophiles to justify more and more surveillance and snooping. Mind you If they find anything interesting in my history I’d love to see it.
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Many of us have our own little causes that we’re campaigning about. Some are local and not world changing. But still we see what’s happening and it’s frightening.
How much of this was always the case and went unseen and how much is visible now because of the internet and our ability to publish and read more widely? Hard to say, but this feels unprecedented.
If you’re speaking an unpopular truth (2+2=4) you’ll find that you’re up against politicians, council departments, marketing people, businesses and of course the whoreporate media with all their funding, resources and PR teams posting and tweeting that 2+2=3.
News sites shriek about “fake news” while giving their readers only some of the facts. Faced with five facts they like and five they don’t they publish them 5/1. So while not actually “lying”, this is how they shape public opinion and pretend to provide “balance”.
All they care is that a majority believes them. Stuff the other 15%, 20% or whatever it is. But word IS getting around and what has happened to Craig Murray and others is an indication of what may come.
What can we do to prepare? Having your own website in not old-fashioned. It is the gold standard and they are difficult to close down. That means a domain name that you own and paid webhosting.
All free services are more likely to censor or delete you completely. Perhaps by “accident” and you have very little come back if you are paying nothing and lose all your posts.
Content should go on your website while Facebook, Twitter and so on are used to promote and direct people to the site and that content. Those services can knee cap you at a whim. Be prepared.
We can’t rely on Google. We need to get back to linking to each other in the way we used to and spread the word by other means (tshirts, print, word of mouth).
John mentioned recently that so many websites are bogged down and barely usable. We can capitalise on this by having fastloading websites. We may need them if net neutrality becomes more of an issue (the net companies prioritising corporate content).
So many sites are slowed down by badly written WordPress themes, embedded videos, third party ads and stats systems. There is still a lot to be said for static HTML if you can write it, instead of database driven PHP such as WordPress. It’s super fast to load.
In the end it’s about words, pictures and the odd video. Many news sites have lost sight of that. Nothing else needed and no one should have to buy the latest gadget or browser to read our stuff.
And keep backups of everything at home and in a second location.
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glad you mentioned Craig Murray and his blog about the ‘atlantic council’ , Nimmo and facebook censorship that decides if you are a Russian bot.. you must be JW… Sarc..
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Concise but informative and as always very necessary.
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….. to say nothing of facebook & twitter’s bad credentials …. they are taking control over a supine/sleeping/stupid population and we make it easy for them – I’m in dispute with my local hospital – having heard that the clinic has not performed surgery for 4 months, all the consultants are on holiday at the same time and no clinics available until the end of September i.e it is CLOSED – my local health service have refused to answer my queries, accepting no liability for this information, refused to comment and hope I go awaay (f**k off) and decline paying for a private consultation even though they are not providing a service to me or anybody else – wasn’t there a recent FOI highlighting the NHS’s duplicity??
They are all in it together and that is what we are up against – STATE VIOLENCE AGAINST THE POPULATION
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Interesting FoI. Do not expect serious answers anytime soon. If reports are correct, May has just committed a huge gaffe in her South African jaunt. SA has no interest in UK £Bribes, when China outguns everybody. She is given pathetic attention and not just because of the dance! Her real gaffe is to apparently totally endorse White Farmer misappropriation of lands, to include mutilation and signature broken-bottle rape. Afrikaners have long memories, as have the many brave indigenous tribes dispossessed by the ANC, who have not delivered on any promises to impoverished citizens of any colour or creed. Just as Bush and Blair, etc, are under severe travel restrictions because of War Crimes, the appeaser May is so afflicted. But the Afrikaners are tough and brave, even in their final agony. What have they got to lose? May could have to beef up her feeble overseas security ? Complacent newly recruited chimps at GreasyHQ have no appreciation of world affairs at their age of Trolling. They will be discarded at whim by their bosses. Sharia law and Muslim dominance is slated to arrive in UK by around 2030-2050. Shall we choose…? Our children will have no choice! what shall we do about the millions of Muslim voters? Plenty assure their party line. Historically, Europeans were doing wode and small beer compared to Euro/Arab structures and “civilisation” ….. I venture that Europe is so fractured by the success of the Kalergi plan that there is no hope of the survival of a distinct and vibrant White Tribe. Docile UK people … wake up!
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I have been of the opinion for some 40 years that before the end of this century there will be dictatorship in the UK. Such has been the destruction of basic values of decency and discipline which are essential for a democracy to survive. Couple that with the massive immigration of different cultures in a relatively short time which then place demands upon services all of which must be paid for out of the public purse and it is a recipe for disaster. At the other end of the scale as people live longer pension provision and care are increasing without the financial input to provide a satisfactory standard of living for ordinary citizens.
We have a fifth column at work dedicated to the destruction of our society – many of whom operate within education and university level – spurred on by post modern ideology and Political correctness which is so lacking in common sense that you question the IQ of the purveyors of such rubbish. Our current political representatives are too busy lining their own pockets ( with few exceptions) and dreaming up schemes without a trace of business acumen ( Brexit included).
I am not a pessimist by nature but I believe we are sleep walking to disaster and dictatorship which at the time will seem a remedy.
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Orwellian dystopia indeed!
People tend to feel safer if they see a bobby on the beat. Community policemen picked up all sorts of intelligence just by stopping to chat in the streets, building relationships, being helpful. I can’t see how feelings of security can be promoted purely by cameras on every street corner, tracking devices and the like.
It strikes me in our solid march towards ‘progress’ that we are losing the human connection in more and more of our daily transactions – with a bank, within a supermarket, on-line retail etc, etc. Our relationships are increasingly with a machine, some form of AI. We are losing the social glue that binds us together as communities. I used to work in the public sector and after many long years of such work I concluded that people were happier with the service they got if it was provided with ears that listened and heard, a hand that touched and a mouth that said ‘I’ll try to help’.
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John: Craig M has stated in the past that Mark Urban, ex British Army (Tank commander) and the security services is ‘their man at the Beeb). In fact, he is their man on Newsnight, it is reasonable to suppose there are others at the Beeb as well, such as Frank Gardner – a direct descendant of William the Conquerer according to Who do you think you are?
Technology always has upsides and downsides, think nuclear tech. It is inevitable that the downsides of tech will be used against us by the authorities – it’s just for your security, sir. It is not for nothing that Google was initially funded by the CIA’s venture cap company or that Facebook is in bed with the NSA/GCHQ, ditto Amazon and the CIA/NSA.
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It’s a very interesting angle on the desire of the government to recruit only people with degrees, your theory does explain why they would only select graduates, having said that, have you meet may of todays graduates? a large number cant’t tell their arse from their elobow.
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I find this profoundly reassuring Geoff. JW
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No wonder they want so much diversity: they know it means people ‘hunker down’ and stay at home (because of the resulting alienation and collapse in trust).
Apparently this is now a mainstream talking point in Austria where ordinary people are asking ”why have they shipped in so many Afghan males?”
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
As an aside, I have just been told by one of the Rotherham whistleblowers that the security situation for Sarah Champion is dire there. She cannot drive her car or go anywhere alone.
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