Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

by Grow Up Conference | Jan 29, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Digital Kill Switches:

How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

By John & Nisha Whitehead

“No president from either party should have the sole power to shut down or take control of the internet or any other of our communication channels during an emergency.”—Senator Rand Paul

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.

As the Guardian reports, “From Ukraine to Myanmar, government-run internet outages are picking up pace around the world. In 2021, there were 182 shutdowns in 34 countries… Countries across Africa and Asia have turned to shutdowns in a bid to control behaviour, while India, largely in the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, plunged into digital darkness more times than any other last year… Civil unrest in Ethiopia and Kazakhstan has triggered internet shutdowns as governments try to prevent political mobilisation and stop news about military suppression from emerging.”

In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.

Tyrants and would-be tyrants rely on this “cloak of darkness” to advance their agendas.

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, overcriminalization, 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.

According to Global Risk Intel, there are many motives behind such restrictions:

“For instance, the kill switch serves to censor content and constrain the spread of news. This particularly concerns news reports that cover police brutality, human rights abuses, or educational information. Governments may also utilize the kill switch to prevent government-critical protestors from communicating through message applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, or Twitter and organizing mass demonstrations. Therefore, internet restrictions can provide a way of regulating the flow of information and hindering dissent. Governments reason that internet limitations help stop the spread of fake news and strengthen national security and public safety in times of unrest.”

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.”

In the event of a national crisis, the president has a veritable arsenal of emergency powers that override the Constitution and can be activated at a moment’s notice. These range from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, restricting travel and implementing a communications kill switch.

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.

The seeds of this ongoing madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.“

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a perceived national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

The internet kill switch is just one piece of the government’s blueprint for locking down the nation and instituting martial law.

There may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public. These powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.

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.

Packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security, restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

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 Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

“The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.”

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.

WC: 1805
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

Ego-ing…. Going…. Gone

by Grow Up Conference | Jan 29, 2024 | Media Partners, The New Agora

Ego-ing…. Going…. Gone

The Hidden Philosophy of Truth …..continued…

Part 1 Here:

By Lindastrologer

We began last time with the philosophical discipline, the first step thereof being a meditation practice.  On this path there must be a continual effort to moderate emotions and so even peak experiences in meditation are to be viewed with a certain conscious detachment. Likewise, off the cushion, all of life’s emotional see-saws must be seen the same way, as the transient vapours of passing mood and feeling that they are. Ultimately, the ancient teachings inform us, on this path reason, not emotion should rule in the end.  All strong, passionate emotions, such as anger, are to be curbed. If they can not be, in the heat of the moment, as soon as they can the disciple on the path is asked to seek to understand where and why the emotional reaction originated.  In this, the path is better suited to individuals who have left the garden of youth and find themselves in the years of middle age – but of course the path is open to all with a willing heart and mind.

The next and closely related imperative is the relinquishing of the ego.  It can be a bitter medicine to swallow to give up the biases of our conditioned minds. And this is exactly what our minds are.  We are all individuated packages of consciousness, here living a temporal third-dimension life in human form and we are programmed from the moment we arrive here – beginning with the first lessons from our parents and then our teachers and playmates and then bosses and mates and so on. We are programmed too by the arrangement of cosmic patterning that comprises our birth chart, crystalised at our first breath.  Yet beyond all of this our consciousness is part of the consciousness – just as the waves are part of the ocean.  The ego is charged with maintaining awareness of the limitation of our individuality. Without this we would have no sense of where we ended and the world began. Our ‘instinct’ to survive would be muted. Our creativity and self-expression probably non-existent.  But unfortunately, the ego can so easily take over the driver’s seat of our consciousness. When this occurs we lose the capacity for detachment from the flux of emotions, the only way to peace, and we lose our ability to reason.

“Every time a man thrusts his ego into a train of thought its balance is disturbed and its truth-value distorted.  If he is to judge every fact by the standards of his earlier experience alone he will thereby prevent new knowledge from arising.” (PB)

In essence, we have forgotten who we really are, the grandeur of who we are, and instead we have fallen into the habit of identifying ourselves with our conditioned version of who we think we are – the illusory self-image – an image that we form through the life process.  We forget it is precisely that – an image. And a limiting one at that.  It is not who we are.  Christopher Wallis, teacher of the Tantrik tradition wrote in his beautiful book ‘Tantra Illuminated’ the following:

“The process by which consciousness moves from the unmanifest state of absolute potential into manifest particularity necessarily involves concealment or forgetting.  For in order for Consciousness to manifest itself in one particular form, it must conceal or suppress all other possible forms.  In order for God to fully become you, and therefore embrace Herself as you, She must temporarily forget everything about Herself that is not you.  Thus the coalescence of Consciousness into embodied form is necessarily an act of self-limitation – but one that is freely chosen.”

God, Shiva-Shakti Consciousness is contracted down into specks of individual self-hood – ie us.  The contraction as Wallis points out, necessitates a forgetting or concealment.  The teachings of the Hidden Philosophy of Truth came out of an innate desire to remember. We all have this spark of desire within us. We know not whether it will manifest as a burn to know the truth, to begin the quest, in this lifetime, or the next.

Regarding the ego, Tantrika teaches the ego is not to be totally annihilated but rather purified and expanded ‘until it simply melts into all that is.’ (CW)  Wallis points out the ego simply means ‘what you think you are, so expanding it means expanding your sense of self.’    How does this fit with the Hidden Teachings (Beyond Yoga) of Paul Brunton – one of the west’s early interpreters of the ancient wisdom?   PB states, as per the quote above, that every time the ego intrudes into a train of thought, its balance is disturbed and therefore its truth value is distorted. This is because of our prior conditioning. If a new idea conflicts with our intrinsic beliefs we are likely to reject it.  This is what he is calling ego – a package of conditioning wrapped up in a self-image.  The Tantrika teachings, whilst not denying the reality of our conditioning and self-image, tell us to ‘purify and expand’ all of that – ie the ego.  Which I take to mean the cracking open of our awareness of the One consciousness – contracted and concealed in our forgetting as it is – to reveal the beauty of who we really are.

The genuine philosophy, PB reminds us, requires us to cast aside the conceit and vanity of egoic preconceptions and prejudices – the quest of truth demands we do.  The simplest way to understand this challenging sounding imperative is to remember to forget the word ‘I’.  Using the word ‘I’ unconsciously keeps us stuck in a particular set of personal beliefs – so many of them inaccurate, others purely pathological.

“It is a pathological fact that the various forms of insanity and mental disorder are rooted in the ego and all the obsessions and complexes are likewise connected with the I.”  (PB)

The obsession with ‘I’ prohibits us from the truth because it quarantines the mind within the boundaries of its own beliefs: bigotry, prejudice, rationalisations in defence of preferences… the list is long.  Reason will always lose out when egoism is calling the shots.

“All this means that those who have the strongest personal views are the most difficult to lead to truth.  Such persons need to absorb the lesson inculcated by Jesus:  “Except ye become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.”   (PB)   This means putting aside all prejudice coming from experience and preconceptions coming from conditioning.  Further, it means, dropping the words ‘I think’, ‘I believe’, ‘I know’……   Opinion is not truth.

The Hidden Philosophy asks us to develop the faculty of reason.  This faculty is known as buddhi – commonly translated as intellect.  The buddhi is our means of formulating conceptions, decisions, judgements and discernment.  It is also the power of imagination.  The ancients tell us discernment is the highest of all the limbs of yoga and ‘the only one that directly leads to liberation.’  (‘Tantra Illuminated.’) We are told this is so because on the spiritual path discerning between what is to be held close and what is to be laid aside is crucial – it determines what is beneficial and what is not.

Of course the logical question is, how does our buddhi know what is most beneficial for us? There is more than one answer to this but the easiest is to say – it doesn’t ultimately matter, if we regard all experiences as learning experiences.  A higher response though is to say the buddhi which is not lead by the ego (an expanded ego we might say) connects us with our innate voice of intuition (the Higher Self). It is this intuitive voice which guides our discernment to lead us to the truth and the truth will always be beneficial for us.

In the meantime, we are all ‘victims’ of our subliminal impressions of past experiences. In Sanskrit – our samskaras.  All our experiences leave impressions and the impressions are like pattern makers dictating how the flow of life is interpreted by us.  Samskaras disrupt and impede the buddhi. They trip us up – whether the psychological wounds of childhood or the traumas of later life experience – all coalescence within the psyche as grooves, like the ones in old records. These samskaras are inextricably linked to what we call the ego.  That is, our self-identity package, the one we form over time is created in large part by our impressions of past experiences – the good the bad and the ugly. The astrological chart shows, to one who knows how to read it, the areas and nature of the most potent of these samskaras. One on the path of the hidden truth is advised, at the outset, to learn the secrets of the cosmic patterning – without becoming too obsessed with the ‘I’.  Things happened. Life here, for all of us, babies, children, young people, old people, is nothing but a pile of experiences and many of them are painful.  It is a challenge but one on the quest of truth will accept willingly – to train oneself, over time and with a committed meditation practice, to detach intellectually and emotionally from habitual identification with what happened.  Often we don’t even know what happened of course. And then the samskaras are even harder to ferret out.  Once they are brought to consciousness they can be processed, digested fully, and eliminated.  We have no choice but to trust the others will dissolve over time as we learn to expand our egos – or drop them – choose your language. And then there is this….a further thought to leave you with …..

“Finally, we should note that in Tantrik Philosophy, the buddhi is not localized in the brain but extends throughout the body.  Thus samskaras of different kinds are distributed throughout the body and can be released by the physical as well as the mental practices of yoga.  We experience the buddhi on different levels of the body; for example when we speak of ‘gut instinct,’ we refer to an aspect of the buddhi’s intentionality associated with very deep, unconscious samskaras which we tend to feel in the viscera, the enteric nervous system.  However, without the practice of yoga, the gut instinct in which we place so much trust might in fact be based in fear and lead us badly astray.”   (‘Tantra Illuminated’ – Christopher Wallis).

See you down the road…