Article by Richard Fernandez in PJMedia

 

The Digital Imprimatur

Today when censorship is being advocated to counter ‘disinformation’ or the ‘Big Lie’ it may be time to remember John Walker, the man who anticipated way back in 2003 that a digital imprimatur would be required to say anything substantial online. Walker was the man who wrote Autocad.

Walker moved to Switzerland in 1991. By 1994, when he resigned from the company, it was the sixth-largest personal computer software company in the world, primarily from the sales of AutoCAD. …

One particularly noteworthy article was titled The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, an article about Internet censorship written in 2003. It was published in the magazine Knowledge, Technology & Policy. In the article, Walker argues that there is increasing pressure limiting the ability for Internet users to voice their ideas, as well as predicting further Internet censorship. Walker claims that the most likely candidate to usher what he calls “the digital imprimatur” is digital rights management or DRM.

The word ‘imprimatur’ is Latin for “let it be printed.” Historically it is “a declaration authorizing publication of a book. The term is also applied loosely to any mark of approval or endorsement. The imprimatur rule in the Roman Catholic Church effectively dates from the dawn of printing, and is first seen in the printing and publishing centers of Germany and Venice.”

English laws of 1586, 1637, and 1662 required an official licence for printing books. The 1662 act required books, according to their subject, to receive the authorization, known as the imprimatur, of the Lord Chancellor, the Earl Marshall, a principal Secretary of State, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Bishop of London. This law finally expired in 1695.

The All-Out Assault on Conservative Thought Has Just Begun

In the early days of the Internet, Walker believed that the imprimatur was gone forever. Then in 2003, he changed his mind. He realized that, like the Gutenberg press before it, the technology for censoring the Internet was growing alongside it.

Over the last two years I have become deeply and increasingly pessimistic about the future of liberty and freedom of speech, particularly in regard to the Internet. This is a complete reversal of the almost unbounded optimism I felt during the 1994–1999 period when public access to the Internet burgeoned and innovative new forms of communication appeared in rapid succession. In that epoch I was firmly convinced that universal access to the Internet would provide a countervailing force against the centralization and concentration in government and the mass media which act to constrain freedom of expression and unrestricted access to information. Further, the Internet, properly used, could actually roll back government and corporate encroachment on individual freedom by allowing information to flow past the barriers erected by totalitarian or authoritarian governments and around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media.

So convinced was I of the potential of the Internet as a means of global unregulated person-to-person communication that I spent the better part of three years developing Speak Freely for Unix and Windows, a free (public domain) Internet telephone with military-grade encryption. Why did I do it? Because I believed that a world in which anybody with Internet access could talk to anybody else so equipped in total privacy and at a fraction of the cost of a telephone call would be a better place to live than a world without such communication.

What changed his mind was the realization that commercial companies would control the network and eventually make everyone micro-pay for — and thus be able to micro-control everything.

The original design of the ARPANET, inherited by the Internet, was inherently peer to peer. … [in 2003] that user is no longer a peer of all other Internet users as the original architecture of the network intended. …

Sites with persistent, unrestricted Internet connections now constitute a privileged class, able to use the Internet in ways a consumer site cannot. They can set up servers, create new kinds of Internet services, establish peer to peer connections with other sites—employ the Internet in all of the ways it was originally intended to be used. We might term these sites “publishers” or “broadcasters”, with the NATted/firewalled home users their consumers or audience. …

With every Internet transaction tagged with the personal certificate of the requester and that of the computer where the request originated, operators of Web sites and other Internet services will be able to “know their customers”. For the first time, Web sites will be able to compile accurate readership statistics, subject to audit by circulation bureaux, as for print publications. This, in turn, may restore the viability of the advertiser-supported business model for popular Web sites.

Internet traffic can be logged and audited by others, for their own purposes, as well. The ability to potentially recover a list of certificates of those who accessed a site containing prohibited content such as child pornography will deter those who now rely on the anonymity of the Internet to shield them from prosecution. Sites indulging in hate speech and/or material of interest to terrorists will find their regular visitors scrutinized by the authorities concerned with such matters. Societies which wish to control the flow of information across their borders can monitor the activity of their nationals to determine whether they are violating imposed restrictions. Parents will be able to monitor the activities of their minor children using certificates they’ve obtained for them which are linked to the parent/guardian’s certificate.

Navalny’s CHILLING Warning: Dictators Will Use Twitter’s Trump Ban to Justify Silencing Opponents

Walker’s predicted censorship and surveillance, made 18 years ago, has arguably come to pass. But isn’t the censor worth it if it protects us from error and the Big Lie? There is a quote on the Internet attributed to Joseph Goebbels on the Big Lie, with whom the concept is most closely associated. Though the quote is unsourced and its provenance disputed, it nevertheless makes two interesting points worth examining.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

The first is that the Big Lie is mostly, if not always, told by the State or at least the establishment because they alone have the “powers to repress dissent.” This is an immensely important insight. The imprimatur is the tool of the ruling elite; they control the Narrative.

The second is that the Big Lie eventually collapses in the face of reality. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.” This raises the possibility that the phenomenon of overt censorship is actually the result of the collapse of an earlier, implicitly accepted narrative.

Are we in the age of Walker’s digital imprimatur or at the point where the holodeck image is flickering, stabilizing, and flickering again prior to going out?

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/01/09/the-digital-imprimatur-n1323245

 

 

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Article by Robert A. Hahn in RedState

 

The Klansmen of Mozilla

Yesterday I learned of a recent posting on the official blog of the Mozilla Foundation. This is the outfit best known for its Firefox web browser. I have had some version of Firefox on my computers since 2004. But after reading the blog post, I uninstalled Firefox and it won’t be back. If you have it installed on your machine, by the time you get to the end of this post you’ll be deleting it too, just to get the stink of it out of your house.

Some weird mind disease has taken over the San Francisco Bay Area. We saw it popping out all over last week from Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. And now here comes the Mozilla Foundation, letting us know that they too are Good Citizens of Silicon Valley, and they can sing the hymns with the best of them. I need to share this with you because, well, because it’s about you. Just listen to this:

There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6.

Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?

But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.

Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.

Never mind the fact that the author believes that the actions of Donald Trump are reprehensible. It’s likely that she has no idea what actions Donald Trump actually took. But she thinks she does — she read it on the Internet — and she thinks his actions are reprehensible. I don’t care, that’s her prerogative. What I care about, and what we all had better start caring about, is that she thinks there are 70 million violent white supremacists in the United States.

She thinks I am a Nazi. She thinks you are a Nazi. She thinks every single person who voted for Donald J. Trump — every single one, from sea to shining sea — is a Nazi… a violent white supremacist.

On its face that is nuts. But she goes further: she thinks they got that way — that I got that way, and you got that way — because Donald Trump made it so… he “fomented” something. She really believes this. You and I are mere “ignorant masses,” blindly following some guy and doing everything he says because we’re too stupid to do anything else.

And don’t miss the tone of it. She doesn’t think anything about her statement is the least bit controversial. Where she lives, among people she knows, what she wrote there passes for common knowledge. That’s right, it’s common knowledge where she lives that there are 70 million violent white supremacists in the United States. And it is up to her and her virtuous friends to silence, or “deplatform” them.

The chutzpah alone qualifies it as seriously insane. But there’s something else at work, a remarkable disconnect from reality that prevents her — and apparently everyone else in that part of the country — from recognizing as preposterous (and instantly dismissing) this idea of a nation of white supremacist proto-Nazis just waiting for the right politician to come along so they can bare their fangs. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, and yet it is like a gigantic mass delusion on virtually the entire West coast of the United States.

The author of this piece is in her 60s. She’s an attorney by trade, a graduate of Boalt Hall — which in California is like saying “Harvard Law.” She is neither stupid nor unsophisticated, and as Chair of a large and famous (at least in tech circles) non-profit, she probably talks to hundreds of people every week. And yet here she is chirping this drivel that we hear from almost everyone in that town about how this country is home to tens of millions of Nazis. How does this happen?

As we have all learned, it will not be possible to hold a dialog with these people. They really believe we’re Nazis. In fact they know it. Not only did they read it on the Internet, they read more of it on the Internet every day. They are steeped in it. They are therefore driven by the same kind of righteous, fulminating hatred that always fills self-appointed moral superiors. They have become the very thing they say they abhor. They are like Klansmen riding through the night, looking for a “Trump supporter” they can silence forever.

These people are insane. And they are dangerous. And as my colleague streiff covered yesterday, they are getting out of hand.

There is not going to be a nice way out of this.

https://redstate.com/robert_a_hahn/2021/01/10/the-klansmen-of-mozilla-n307569

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Hundreds displaced after tornado hits Texas City

 

OAN Newsroom

UPDATED 9:30 AM  PT – Sunday, January 10, 2021

Hundreds of families in Texas City are displaced after a tornado touched down. Thursday, the National Weather Service confirmed that an EF-1 tornado caused severe damage as it ripped through the city on Wednesday night.

Though the storm was quick, residents said it was horrifying.

 

 

No injuries were reported, but officials said the Tradewinds Apartments suffered the worst damage.

“Our building official, Herman Myers, took a good look at the building and determined that for purposes of severe safety and precautionary measures, the building would be temporarily shut down,” a city official explained. “Structural engineers can have the opportunity to further inspect the building to ensure the safety of everyone.”

Officials are unsure when tenants will be able to return to their home.

 

https://www.oann.com/hundreds-displaced-after-tornado-hits-texas-city/ 

 

 

 

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The ‘Virtue’ of the New Totalitarians

Later ages are always surprised by the casual brutality of totalitarian regimes. What they neglect is the unshakeable (though misguided) conviction of virtue that animates the totalitarians.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

What was the most disturbing thing to happen in the last few days? 

Some say it was the horrifying spectacle of the mob besieging and breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. 

That was indeed disturbing, especially the pageant of wonton assaults on property in the seat of our government and, most of all, the images of Ashli Babbitt, the young woman who was shot and killed, apparently by law enforcement.  

There is much we do not know about what happened that afternoon. But I think Tucker Carlson was right about two essential things. 

One, that President Trump bears some responsibility for what happened. He “recklessly encouraged,” as Carlson put it, his distraught supporters. I should note, by the way, that I believe that the president’s supporters are right to be distraught—and not just because their guy lost. That’s the nature of elections. One candidate wins, the other loses. So long as the election is fair, and is seen to be fair, all is well. The loser, and the loser’s supporters, may mutter, but they accept the result and go home. 

But in the 2020 election there were huge and, in my view, determinative irregularities. Had the votes been fairly counted, I believe, Trump would have won. But they weren’t. 

Hence the anger among his supporters. The president should have appreciated their anger and acted accordingly. He ought also to have appreciated that by January 6, the game was over. There was nothing Vice President Mike Pence could have done that would have changed the outcome of the election. When Trump concluded his remarks to the crowd by encouraging them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and go “to the Capitol,” he was playing with fire. He ought to have discerned as much. 

But I believe Carlson is also correct that the president did not intend or foresee the mayhem that followed. As the transcript of his remarks shows, he encouraged the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” He ought to have known that more could transpire. A huge, fired-up crowd is a mob just waiting to happen. But Carlson was right: this was a “political protest” that “got out of hand,” not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism,” as Joe Biden and others we quick to claim. 

The double standard of outrage has been detailed by many commentators. It takes nothing away from the horror of the mob descending on the Capitol this week to point out that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and their media mouthpieces were outrage deficient when another mob assaulted the Supreme Court during the Bret Kavanaugh hearings, when Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters torched cities across the country this summer, or, indeed, when there were riots in Washington following Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. 

As the commentator Howie Carr put it, “some riots are more equal than others.” Like Carr, I condemn what happened at the Capitol last week. But I also “wonder where all this outrage was among the chattering classes when the orgy of rioting, looting, arson and murder was gripping the nation last summer.” (As usual, The Babylon Bee deployed some illuminating satire, writing that “Antifa accuses Trump supporters of cultural appropriation.”) 

When BLM rioters were burning cities and attacking the police, Colin Kaepernick publicly called for more violence. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, responded by making a $3 million contribution to one of Kaepernick’s charities. 

Which brings me to my own candidate for the most disturbing thing to happen in the last several days: the apparently coordinated attack by Big Tech to destroy free speech. 

On Friday, we learned that Twitter had banned the president of the United States from its platform. Facebook and other media quickly followed suit. General Mike Flynn and the lawyer Sidney Powell were also “de-platformed” as were several other prominent conservatives. 

But we know now that such actions are but the tip of the Big Tech iceberg.  Again, Tucker Carlson zeroed in on the terrifying reality of our situation. It wasn’t just that President Trump and some of his supporters were silenced. The entire media ecosphere went into overdrive to muzzle opinions with which they disagree.  On Friday, Google announced that it was excluding the app for the Twitter alternative Parler from its platform. Saturday night, Apple removed Parler from its app store. And as I write, Amazon announced that as of midnight Sunday, Parler’s data would be removed from its servers. Why? Two reasons. First, because conservatives are flocking to Parler in their disgust with Twitter, so there is a commercial reason.  But the second reason is pure politics. As Parler’s CEO John Matze noted, “Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.”

What we are seeing, as Carlson pointed out in his conversation with the journalist Glenn Greenwald, is the elevation of a “tiny handful of tech oligarchs” to a position of essentially untrammeled power to determine what we see, what we hear, and with whom we may communicate. No one elected them, but they are in many respects “more powerful than any nation state,” unaccountable and overwhelmingly representing a far-left point of view. 

Where does it stop? Not with the book publishing industry. Simon & Schuster just announced that they have cancelled Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) new book The Tyranny of Big Tech, allegedly because he supported President Trump and exercised his legal right to debate allegations of voter fraud on the Senate floor. Hawley was quite right that Simon & Schuster’s action was positively “Orwellian.” Simon & Schuster, he tweeted, “is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to re-define as sedition. Let me be clear, this is not just a contract dispute. It’s a direct assault on the first amendment. Only approved speech can now be published. This is the left looking to cancel everyone they don’t approve of.” I admire Sen. Hawley’s spirit: “I will fight this cancel culture culture with everything I have. We’ll see you in court.”

Roger L. Simon was not being hyperbolic when he suggested that what we are seeing is the devolution of the United States into a one-party totalitarian state akin to Communist China. It’s not, Simon notes, “communism in the traditional sense. Karl Marx wouldn’t recognize it, not that what he had on offer was any better.” Instead, what we are witnessing is communism as a sort of “paleo-virtue signaling.”

What China actually is (and where the United States is headed or has already arrived) is a form of oligarchic fascism. The capitalist market’s fine as long as it’s my capitalist market and you’re a member of my party.

I see I have used variations of the word “oligarchy” a couple of times. Let me end by using it once more, with an assist from Thucydides. In his account of the end of Athenian Democracy, the great historian recounts the conspiracy to assassinate Androcles, a leader of the democratic faction, in 411 BC. “Fear, and the sight of the numbers of the conspirators, closed the mouths of the rest. . . . Indeed all the popular party approached each other with suspicion, each thinking his neighbor involved in what was going on, the conspirators having in their ranks persons whom no one could ever have believed capable of joining an oligarchy.” 

But there they were—and here we are. It didn’t work out so well for Athenian democracy. Will it be any better for us? No one’s crystal ball is farsighted enough to say. The conflict is between what Samuel Huntington called the American Creed—fired by a belief in the sanctity of individual liberty, private property, and limited government—and the assault on that creed by the forces of “progressive” political progressivism and identity politics. 

Later ages are always surprised by the casual brutality of totalitarian regimes. What those innocent ages neglect is the unshakeable (though misguided) conviction of virtue that animates the totalitarians. The historian John Kekes, writing about Robespierre in City Journal some years ago, touched on the essential point. If we understand Robespierre, “we understand that it is utterly useless to appeal to reason and morality in dealing with ideologues. For they are convinced that reason and morality are on their side and that their enemies are irrational and immoral simply because they are enemies.” That is the position of conservatives in American culture today.

How Joe Biden risks the biggest giveaway ever to China in space

by Gordan G. Chang writing at The Hill

People on the NASA transition team of Joe Biden are urging the United States to start what could be the biggest transfer of technology to China. The giveaway could result in the Chinese military dominating space and, with it, world affairs. “Trying to exclude them, I think, is a failing strategy,” said Pam Melroy, a former astronaut and potential next administrator of NASA, referring to the Chinese. “It is very important that we engage.”

Important to engage? The Chinese space program is military at its core and, to the extent it is civilian, it serves as a conduit to the military. China has a policy of civil military fusion. This means the army has first call on anything and everything in civilian hands. Moreover, we should not forget the structure of the Chinese regime. The military is an operation of the Communist Party, which controls all the programs of the Chinese central government as well as every educational and research institution in the country. The space program is a party venture.

The Chinese military has major plans for the Moon, sometimes called the eighth continent. As military analyst Richard Fisher told me, “China wants to mine helium from the Moon to power its future fusion energy reactors and to use Moon resources to help build enormous solar energy collecting satellites to free it from foreign energy dependence.” 

China also plans to colonize the Moon with military bases. “By controlling the Moon, China can control access to the Lagrangian Points and better control access to Mars and other planets,” Fisher, who is affiliated with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said. Stations floating at Lagrangian Points, orbital locations where gravitational forces balance and make it less expensive to maintain artificial objects in space, would allow China to dominate the new “interstates” to the heavens.

The stakes are high. As Brandon Weichert, the author of “Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower,” explains, “Whoever controls the strategic high ground of space will ultimately control the course of events on Earth, in the strategic domains of land, sea, air, even cyberspace.”

Such Chinese space ambitions should concern other countries with such goals. “The universe is an ocean, the Moon is the Diaoyu Islands, and Mars is Huangyan Island,” Ye Peijian, the leader of the Chinese lunar program, said two years ago, referring to the Japanese islands in the East China Sea and Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea.

“If we do not go there now even though we are capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you will not be able to go even if you want to.” Ye, with his reference to locations that Beijing views as sovereign territory, is making clear that China has no intention of allowing others on the Moon or other features in space, and that also means working with the Chinese space program would either be impossible or deeply misguided.

“The transition team is intent on partnering with the Chinese space agency despite the fact that they are aware of Chinese intentions,” Weichert said. Indeed, the cost of cooperation will be high. “For the Chinese, this will be the greatest technology transfer from us to them in their history. It will all but ensure they conquer space.” 

Biden and his transition team may think they can limit partnering with China but that, as a practical matter, is unlikely to be the case here. “The problem with engaging China in super sensitive joint ventures is that the American side always starts with the best intentions, and safeguards and security checks are put in place by senior people but then, at the lower levels, the Chinese find ways to worm their way into areas they do not belong,” Paul Midler, an Asia analyst and author, told me. “Somehow, unwittingly, our side starts sharing too much.”

The whole idea of cooperation is flawed. Let us revisit how Ye compared space features with those in Chinese peripheral waters. In 2015, President Xi Jinping stood next to President Obama in the Rose Garden and told his host that, with regard to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, “China does not intend to pursue militarization.” Yet China did exactly that a year after this promise, and the Chinese Ministry of Defense issued a statement justifying its “necessary military facilities.” Any pledges from Beijing about its intentions in space will, in all likelihood, be as worthless.

The space advisers to Biden have gotten the process backwards. Cooperation does not necessarily lead to a better relationship with militant regimes. There must be a basis of cooperation first, and unfortunately that does not exist with China. As Fisher, the military analyst, warns, “There can be no peace in space with the Communist Party until there is first peace with the Communist Party on Earth.”

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Intelligence analysts downplayed Chinese election influence to avoid supporting Trump policies

Jerry Dunleavy reporting for Washington Examiner

Politicization problems exist in U.S. spy agency assessments on foreign influence in the 2020 U.S. election, including analysts who appeared to hold back information on Chinese meddling efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration's policies, according to an intelligence community inspector.

Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, issued a 14-page report obtained by the Washington Examiner to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, revealing his investigation was “conducted in response to IC complaints regarding the election threat issue." In addition, he lamented the “polarized atmosphere has threatened to undermine the foundations of our Republic, penetrating even into the Intelligence Community.”

The intelligence community’s classified assessment on foreign influence in the 2020 election, which will not focus on claims of mail-in fraud or unfounded allegations of voting machines flipping millions of votes, was also submitted to Congress on Thursday. Expected in December, the assessment was delayed as senior intelligence officials clashed over the role played by China, and as director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe sought to include more viewpoints in the final analysis.

“Given analytic differences in the way Russia and China analysts examined their targets, China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies,” Zulauf concluded, saying this behavior violated analytic standards requiring independence from political considerations.

The ombudsman shared a number of recommendations he said had been accepted by Ratcliffe, including to “reinforce through direct leadership communications from ODNI to the workforce as a whole, and from agency heads to all IC agencies, the importance of protecting analytic integrity and a renewed commitment to analytic objectivity and avoiding politicization in both policy and practice."

Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas, signed a three-page unclassified letter on Thursday, also obtained by the Washington Examiner, in which he contended that “from my unique vantage point as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China, I do not believe the majority view expressed by the Intelligence Community analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections." The ombudsman report, Ratcliffe added, "includes concerning revelations about the politicization of China election influence reporting and of undue pressure being brought to bear on analysts who offered an alternative view based on the intelligence.”

A senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner that “inside the IC, we’re going to have to wrestle with the issues outlined in this report and the revelation that our own internal umpire basically said Ratcliffe was right and some of our career people, even CIA management, were politicizing China intelligence.”

This comes four years after an assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which is still contested by some, and the backdrop of the debate is laden with rising concern about China's influence over U.S. lawmakers, a massive SolarWinds hack assessed to have been likely conducted by Russia, and the chaos on Wednesday as supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol and attempted to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes certifying President-elect Joe Biden win.

Congress worked late into the night and the early morning, certifying Biden's victory just before 4 a.m. on Thursday. Following the decision, Trump said he would commit to an orderly transition of power on Inauguration Day.

A source familiar with the process of creating the 2020 assessment told the Washington Examiner that one reason for the delay in submitting the assessment to Congress, in addition to the internal debate, was a desire to get past Wednesday to ensure the report was not exploited for political reasons during the debate over the Electoral College votes counted by Congress. The source cited concerns about how politicians, such as outspoken Trump critics like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, might exploit the report, but also sought to avoid allowing conspiracy theorists such as Trump-allied lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood to make misleading claims about it that would make their way to Trump for him to latch on to as he refused to concede.

The ombudsman’s report added: “Russia analysts assessed that there was clear and credible evidence of Russian election influence activities. They said IC management slowing down or not wanting to take their analysis to customers, claiming that it was not well received, frustrated them. Analysts saw this as suppression of intelligence, bordering on politicization of intelligence from above.”

Zulauf said that “due to varying collection and insight into hostile state actors’ leadership intentions on domestic influence campaigns, the definitional use of the terms ‘influence’ and ‘interference’ and associated confidence levels are applied differently by the China and Russia analytic communities.” He pointed out that Russia analysts could rely on a formal definition document, but “there is no parallel document for China,” and so, “the terms were applied inconsistently across the analytic community."

In his letter, Ratcliffe said that “it is clear to me that different groups of analysts who focus on election threats from different counties are using different terminology to communicate the same malign actions” and “similar actions by Russia and China are assessed and communicated to policymakers differently, potentially leading to the false impress that Russia sought to influence the election but China did not.”

The ombudsman said that “the most egregious example" of attempts to politicize intelligence "is the talking points provided alongside the written introductory statement delivered by, but not written by" National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director Bill Evanina in March 2019. Zulauf also pointed to Evanina’s July and August statements, saying Evanina “said that he assumed they represented coordinated IC views,” but the ombudsman concluded that “they in fact did not represent fully coordinated IC views.”

The ODNI under then-acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell provided an unclassified fact sheet briefed to Congress in March, stating that “the IC has not concluded that the Kremlin is directly aiding any candidate’s reelection. … This is not a Russia-only problem.” In July, Evanina released a statement contending that “we’re primarily concerned with China, Russia, and Iran."

The August assessment warned that Russia was “using a range of measures to primarily denigrate” Biden, noting that Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach was working to undermine the former vice president. Evanina also said Iran sought to "undermine" Trump and divide the country ahead of 2020. In addition, he said that “we assess that China prefers that President Trump ... does not win reelection" and that China "has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020" and “recognizes that all of these efforts” could affect the election.

Zulauf said that “analysts claim that NIC leadership consistently watered down conclusions during a drawn out review process, boosting the threat from China and making the threat from Russia sound not too controversial” and that “NIC officials pointed to ODNI senior officials as intervening in the changes.” But the ombudsman said Ratcliffe “just disagreed with the established analytic line on China” and quoted him insisting that “we are missing China’s influence in the U.S. and that Chinese actions ARE intended to affect the election.” The ombudsman said that “ultimately the DNI insisted in putting material on China in, and was aware analysts disagreed,” and “as a result, the final published NICA, analysts felt, was an outrageous misrepresentation of their analysis.” Zulauf said Ratcliffe acknowledged that “many analysts think I am going off script,” but “they don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”

The ombudsman revealed two national intelligence officers wrote an “NIC alternative analysis memo” in October “which expressed alternative views on potential Chinese election influence activities" but stressed that “these alternative views met with considerable organizational counter pressure.”

“ODNI has to ensure that alternative views are expressed, even when they differ from the majority. A healthy challenge culture in the IC can foster differences of analytic views and ensure that they are shared in intelligence products,” Zulauf concluded. “In my discussions with him, DNI Ratcliffe agreed with the concerns expressed in the alternative analysis memo.” The ombudsman emphasized the analytic standard that assessments be based on all available sources of intelligence.

“The analytic ombudsman says Ratcliffe wasn’t being political — he was being honest that China intelligence was being suppressed for political reasons,” the senior intelligence official contended to the Washington Examiner.

“It is evident that what began as a mischaracterization of IC analytic assessment by ODNI officials escalated into an ongoing widespread perception in the workforce about politicization and loss of analytic objectively throughout the community on the topics of Russian and Chinese election influence and interference,” the ombudsman assessed. “No ODNI official has stated that reviews or edits of election threat intelligence were phrased in a way that was explicitly political in nature. Rather, from the ODNI leadership perspective, officials were seeking a way to deliver intelligence in a way that the Trump Administration would consume it.”

Ratcliffe contended that “the majority view expressed in this ICA with regard to China’s actions to influence the election fall short of the mark” and that “alternative viewpoints on China’s election interference efforts have not been appropriately tolerated.” He said the yet-classified ICA “gives the false impression” that the national intelligence officer for cyber “is the only analyst who holds the minority view on China" and that “placing the NIO Cyber on a metaphorical island by attaching his name alone to the minority view is a testament to both his courage and to the effectiveness of the institutional pressures that have been brought to bear on others who agree with him.”

“In 1962, a National Intelligence Estimate stated that the Soviet Union was unlikely to place missiles in Cuba. Then-CIA Director John McCone forcefully disagreed with the analysts, and later ordered the U-2 reconnaissance flights that discovered that missiles had in fact been deployed,” Ratcliffe concluded. “In that same spirit, I am adding my voice in support of the stated minority view — based on all available sources of intelligence, with definitions consistently applied, and reached independent of political considerations or undue pressure — that the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”

The Trump spy chief provided a glimpse into the internal intelligence community debate in December during an interview with the Washington Examiner.

“You have analysts that have been here from the Cold War era and are used to it being Russia, or in the last 20 years, it has been about counterterrorism — and again, I’m not minimizing those — but the greatest threat that we face and a greater amount of our focus needs to be on China," Ratcliffe said.

2020: the year the elites failed upwards

After months of repeated errors and deceptions, experts and institutions are more powerful than ever

by Jacob Siegel for Tablet Magazine

For a year filled with fear and uncertainty, as plague collided with the final eruptions of the Trump era, the political lessons of 2020 are uncannily clear. Elite institutional authority is everywhere collapsing in a bonfire of self-immolation even as elite institutions become ever more powerful.

What ties the impeachment drama that began the year together with the pandemic, months of political violence and faulty predictions of a Biden blowout, is a system-wide failure of expert knowledge and elite institutional response. “Where were all the experts?” asked New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo in April, at the height of his state’s Covid outbreak. Cuomo blamed more or less every wing of the sprawling structure of elite expertise, pointing the finger for what happened on his watch at “the international health community… the WHO, the NIH, the CDC… the intelligence community… the New York Times… the Wall Street Journal”.

Sure, the governor’s complaint was self-serving given his own disastrous handling of the pandemic, but it wasn’t wrong. Weeks earlier, the Center for Disease Control, after months of declaring face masks ineffective and imploring the public not to wear them — a position echoed by the US Surgeon General, by Biden’s soon-to-be chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, and by most of the media — abruptly reversed course and endorsed face covering as vital to containing the spread of Covid.

Masks were the most visible representation of this: a year defined by politicised expert opinion detaching itself from reality and undergoing sudden reversals. Mass gatherings went from deadly superspreader events to being practically mandatory as a matter of public moral hygiene, with the rise of the BLM protests in May. Covering up such absurdities required the combined effort of ideological enforcers in the press and on social media, brute intimidation by people with hiring and firing power, and the constant appearance of a new crisis to distract from the last.

The compound effect was a cleavage in which half the country now rejects the legitimacy of America’s nominally non-political institutions. Tucker Carlson, whose relentless criticism of the ruling class has made him the top-rated cable news host in the country, summed up the sentiment in a recent segment on how the “experts have been exposed as frauds”. But this is not only a right-wing or populist phenomenon. From the liberal centre, Yascha Mounk wrote in late December about “losing trust in the institutions”.

The first important lesson from the past year is that this revolt against the experts is not a fringe phenomenon driven by QAnon loons, hysterical anti-vaxxers and other untouchables. It is widespread and its consequences are already profound. On the surface, people are simply rejecting the authority of institutions such as the CDC, which now openly advocates for racial preferences and places political calculations before the public good. But beneath that rejection, there is a cultural shift at the level of animating beliefs.

For millions of people, a disenchantment has broken the spell which upheld their faith in rational, scientific knowledge as the best means to tame the natural chaos of reality and administer the business of society. On top of all the other disenchantments undermining America’s founding myths, this one erodes the foundation on which the entire technocratic regime of modern society rests.

Given the rather obvious importance of public health officials in the midst of a pandemic, why not seek to replace them with a better class of expert, instead of attacking the basis of expertise? The answer to that is in the second lesson of 2020: far from losing status after the repeated errors and deceptions of the past year, America’s institutional elite is more powerful than ever.

Perhaps some reputational damage has been inflicted on the experts who warned that the real threat of the coronavirus was overreacting, or worse, racism, and on the elite activists who advanced a deeply unpopular police abolition agenda ahead of national elections, and on the scientific establishment that declared “white supremacy” to be “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19”.

But those costs are marginal compared to the material and political gains. If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.

The collective fortunes of the experts who failed Andrew Cuomo and the citizens of New York have run in parallel with those of the governor. Cuomo oversaw a fiercely politicised coronavirus response. He made costly mistakes, including his mandate that nursing homes accept discharged Covid-19 patients without testing to determine if they were still contagious, a policy that resulted in thousands of deaths (we don’t know exactly how many because he refuses to release the numbers). And yet, somehow in the midst of a death toll approaching 40,000 he found the time to write a book touting “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic” and do a victory tour.

He’s laundered his reputation in a way that can only be compared to the Russiagate diehards. The political actors and intelligence operatives claiming a Trump-Putin conspiracy who were exposed as, at best, delusional frauds have faced no consequences. Rather, they’ve been rewarded with campaign contributions, book deals, TV appearances, and other tokens of commercial and cultural prestige. The vast surveillance apparatus that engineered the domestic spying operation has been legitimised as a tool for correcting against unfortunate errors in democracy when the will of the people gets it wrong.

The future is looking bright for the DC foreign policy elite whose combined wisdom produced the Iraq War, abetted the catastrophe in Syria, scoffed at Trump’s efforts at a peace deal in the Middle East, and who now fight tooth and nail to keep US troops stranded in a lost war in Afghanistan.

In the last week of December, that paragon of public expertise, Dr Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he admitted to lying to the American public. “Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” on the necessary threshold of vaccinations before America would achieve herd immunity, according to the Times. His reason for misleading the public? “His gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”

Sometimes, good leaders deceive the public in moments of crisis to achieve a greater good. But that is not the case here. If you are bragging to the media about it, it was not a noble lie. Fauci’s lie appears to have served no vital purpose related to public health — as if anyone opposed to vaccination would be moved by a 10-point spread in Fauci’s estimates. I don’t envy any leader charged with directing policy in the midst of a plague, but Fauci’s problem is not that he made errors but is so utterly unaware of that fact; that insulated by political celebrity and bureaucratic sinecure, he would choose to conspicuously gloat about his deceptions in the Times. On the same day, the interview appeared, the good doctor received a birthday serenade from Joe and Jill Biden.

The political elites of both parties are ending the year on top. The Democratic leadership defeated the populist threat from Bernie Sanders and now has one of its own, Joe Biden, leading the country. The Republican leadership has its own reasons to be happy about a Biden White House. The GOP got very comfortable adopting the symbolism of Trumpism while blocking White House policies like stimulus spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. With Trump out of office, Republicans can drop the balancing act and go back to satisfying the party’s donor base with cheap labour, austerity policies, foreign military adventures and the distraction of permanent culture war.

Underwriting the growing power of this interconnected media-administrative-political elite is the new American oligarchy led by Silicon Valley. The same tech industry that led a heavy-handed approach to the pandemic, censoring non-expert opinions while amplifying institutions like the World Health Authority, while the WHO at various points opposed wearing masks, criticised travel bans as ineffective, and disputed that the virus is highly contagious — all while lavishing praise on China. The US is down 10 million jobs since the start of the year. One hundred and sixty thousand small businesses have shuttered. Children are going without school and friendship, ordinary people are languishing in isolation and despair. But with government stimulus spending facilitating an immense upward transfer of wealth, the top tier of corporate profits has soared along with the stock market.

“The tactics that helped many corporate titans thrive — laying off thousands of workers, going deep into debt, and grabbing market share from struggling competitors — will shape the recovery for months, if not years,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December. In the past year, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple have added a total of $2 trillion in market value between them.

The spillover from that record-setting cash grab will go directly to subsidising the failing elite institutions and expert bodies that are cutting off the oxygen to American society. But the crucial question is why elite institutions that are so error prone, and so untrustworthy, don’t suffer for their repeated failings.

The answer begins with understanding the nature of their power. In a society with a useful class of elites, their legitimating authority would be bound to the national interest and derive from the benefits they produce for the larger society. Likewise, in a functioning technocratic establishment the value of expertise would be a function of how accurately it can assess complex events, explain reality and forecast outcomes. But that is not what we have. For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals. The mantra of this cohort, “believe science,” says it all. It’s an incantation in a cheap magic act, one that has nothing to do with science.

If you still think science is above this kind of thing, too important to be compromised by ideology and self-interest, just look at the US military. The military has transformed into an institution in which the highest level of leadership is so estranged from its fundamental purpose — to win wars and secure peace at home — it responds to losing wars by absorbing the logic of defeat into its essential operations. The fact of America’s failure in Afghanistan becomes the reason to stay.

The iron law of the American elite is that as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards. Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures. This is why the loss in authority that manifests in the “crisis of experts”, while real, doesn’t diminish their power. But it’s also why the regime has to become more ideological and nakedly coercive — for a kingdom of experts without reliable expertise falls back on propaganda and state power.