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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth

It's a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

The field of International Relations has studied the enemies of the Klept in detail: the Transnational Activist Network is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the Transnational Uncivil Society Network, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.

These TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in last month's European Journal of International Relations:

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

The authors document how a collection of institutions – some coercive, others organized around good works – allow kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power. This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform. It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.

Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Beyond providing comfort to "Politically Exposed Persons" and "High Net-Worth Individuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats. These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun – and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.

To fight this "Boomerang Effect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities. They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.

When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups – they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors. Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights – provided they don't target the Russian state.

If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of organized copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK – the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence – Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers

Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep

They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab

They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair

Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent. The Golden Passports of the EU – available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese – offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the Khmer Riche – the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/

But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on diplomatic passports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).

All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have extensive properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).

This stuff works. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM Tony Blair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any kind of international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of commodities for sale in the UK to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).

The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.

But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, Gulnara Karimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited – and received – bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan. All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.

Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister. She and her husband Timur Tillyaev ran the Dubai-based SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque Scottish Limited Partnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets – a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.

Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador." She was a UNESCO ambassador and commissioned works of monumental art – and also sued the shit out of news outlets that reported factual matters about her family repressive activity at home. She organized AIDS charities in the name of Uzbekistan – even as her father was imprisoning a writer for publishing a book explaining how to have safer sex.

The second case-study is on Isabel dos Santos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator Jose Eduardo dos Santos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries. Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.

Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" – a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm PLMJ. Her enablers are who's who of corruption-loving lickspittles: McKinsey, Ernst and Young, Boston Consulting Group, and the Spanish BigLaw firm Uri Menendez.

Isabel cultivated a public facade of philanthropic giving and public spirited activism, serving as head of the Angolan Red Cross. She attended Davos and spoke at the LSE (she was also invited to Oxford, but her invitation was subsequently rescinded). On social media, she dismissed critics of her wealth and corruption as "colonialists," decrying their "racism" and "prejudice."

Isabel dos Santos's corrupt sources of wealth were finally, irrefutably exposed through the Luanda Leaks, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists mapped the network of "top banks, management consultants and legal firms that were central to dos Santos’s operations."

Both case studies shed light on the network of brilliant, driven enablers and procurers without whom the world's greatest monsters would falter. It's a rare window on a secretive world, one that is poorly understood even by its inhabitants. As Michael Mechanic wrote in Jackpot, his 2021 book on vast, intergenerational fortunes, the winners of the lucky orifice lottery often lack any real understanding of how The Money is structured, grown and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#affluenza

This point was reiterated by Abigail Disney, in a brave piece on what it's like to grow up subject to the oversight of these millionaires who babysit the children of billionaires:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

This is an important contribution to the literature. We naturally focus on the ultrawealthy individuals whose reputations and fortunes are the subject of so much attention, but without the TUSNs, they would be largely helpless.

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Colin (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palace_of_Westminster_from_the_dome_on_Methodist_Central_Hall_(cropped).jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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scavengedluxury · 9 months

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#the billionaires have been wooed #uk politics #sir kid starver #meltbusters #this newspaper is still owned by a Russian oligarch

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lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers · 2 years

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Two donors who gave Tories £1m between them handed public health jobs | Conservatives | The Guardian

British oligarchs?

#uk politics #tories #tory party #tory party doners #oligarchs #paying for access

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viljaangelica · 2 years

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A woman who hates women as "Women Minister", a party who hates free speech limiting it, a financial advisor of colour who obviously don't like poor (often coloured) people... Maybe a Minister with a voice for those who's already here would be a better choice? 🤔

Press Photographer arrested while filming a demonstration:

youtube

“Maria Caulfield has previously stated that she wants to be a ‘voice for the unborn child’. The Independent

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/anger-as-mp-who-suggested-cutting-abortion-time-limit-is-made-minister-for-women/ar-AA13vIjr

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E2nnFA1kJiw

youtube

#uk politics #new month new prime minister #whats new?#oligarchs in politics #speechless #womens rights #injustice #poverty #indifference #big sigh #university memes #worldwide #silencing #muted society #Youtube

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tomorrowusa · 2 years

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How London became a laundromat for dirty Russian money.

Of course we should not get too smug on this side of the Atlantic. Though less conspicuous, a lot of Russian money is sloshing around in NYC, Florida, and other select locations in the USA.

Russian money flows through U.S. real estate

#money laundering #russia #russian oligarchs #dirty money #real estate #london #uk #jonathan pie

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ur-mag · 6 months

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Oligarch’s ‘Missing’ £100,000,000 will at centre of court fight | In Trend Today

Oligarch’s ‘Missing’ £100,000,000 will at centre of court fight Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

View On WordPress

#000 #000 will at centre of court fight #Celebrities #Money #Motors #Oligarch’s ‘Missing’ £100 #Politics #ShowBiz #Sport #Tech #UK #US #World

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niveditaabaidya · 1 year

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UK Sanctions ‘Financial Fixers’ For Russian Oligarchs Abramovich And Usm...

#youtube #UK Sanctions ‘Financial Fixers’ For Russian Oligarchs Abramovich And Usmanov. news russia eu europe asia britain china Britain on Wednesday

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eaglesnick · 1 year

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Is Capitalism Working? Landowners (3)

After the aristocracy and large corporations the third biggest landowners in the UK are oligarchs and city bankers.

A headline in the New Yorker (17/03/22) had this headline:

“How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London: From banking to boarding schools, the British establishment has long been at their service, discretion guaranteed.”

Many would say that the greed of British banks and financial services knows no bounds but that would be wrong. In February last year the BBC had this headline:

“UK fast-tracks law to tackle Russian 'dirty money' The UK is fast-tracking legislation to target money-laundering by foreign oligarchs. The government's move follows Russia's decision to invade Ukraine. As part of the measures, foreign property owners will have to declare their identities rather than using companies as a façade.” (BBC: 28/02/22)

Until the invasion of Ukraine, Russian oligarchs had been actively (but secretly) encouraged to use British banks and financial services to launder their dirty money.

In 2020, the BBC disclosed that an associate of Putin had used Barlays Bank to “launder millions” of pounds, thereby escaping US sanction imposed on him since 2014. And the Financial Times reported that over the last 20 years London has become one of:

“...the preferred investment locations — if not the favoured destination — for Russian oligarchs, as well a key financial centre for Russian companies, all encouraged by British governments of different political stripes.” (Financial Times: 04/03/22)

Much of these ”investments” went into the London property market.

“Over the past two decades, London’s high-end property market was overrun by the global superrich led by Russian oligarchs who did so many big, brash deals that locals called the city Londongrad.” (Wall Street Journal: 09/03/22)

The laundering of Russian criminal money by the City of London, be it the spoils of cyber crime, illicit arms deals or other mercenary activities, has been known about for years. Russian money entering the property market has pushed up prices. Successive British governments have turned a blind eye to this because they welcomed the increase in foreign money because it helped Britain with its balance of trade deficit.

Apart from the morally corrupt impact this has on our body politic, government complicity in this sordid chapter of our history has a cost for all of us.

When the super-rich oligarchs buy top end properties, the slightly less wealthy:

“…start to look into marginally less expensive districts, where the most successful professionals might be pushed further afield, and so on, until first-time buyers in outer boroughs find their studio flats are a notch more pricey." (Rowan Moore, quoted in The Week: 09/03/22))

This domino effect has helped push up property prices for all of us, and as property prices rise, so do rents.

But it is not only land buying oligarchs who have pushed up the price of British housing and rents.

“A ‘Great Reset’ of the British property market is currently underway, with big banks buying up houses across the country and edging out first-time homebuyers.” (Breitbart: 30/08/21)

It would seem banks are partnering up with housing developers to purchase new homes with the intent of renting them out, a buy-to-let scheme on an industrial scale. Lloyds Bank, for example, bailed out by the British taxpayer in 2009, has plans to become the country’s largest landlord by 2030.

Houses are no longer viewed by banks as places for people to live, but as profitable assets. Banks have at their disposal an almost unlimited supply of money. The entry of the banks into the housing market not only pushes up the price of residential properties to the detriment of all of us but it also has negative consequences for the housing rented sector.

“If this level of investment in residential stock ‘built to rent’ continues, the letting market in the UK will undergo a seismic change – with small independent landlords being squeezed out to the periphery.” (Guardian: 19/08/21)

Once the independent landlords have been squeezed out of the market the banks will hold a monopoly, and be more interested in maximising profits for their shareholders, rather than providing decent affordable homes for their tenants.

#Capitalism #uk politics #property #land ownership #banks #oligarchs #russians #Londongrad #money laundering

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the-happy-man · 2 years

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https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2z84rj

#adam curtis #uk housing #anarchy in the uk #uk oligarchs #special relationship #british housing #british housing disaster #uk cost of living crisis

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merelygifted · 2 years

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Children of oligarchs may have used parents’ funds for UK ‘golden visas’ | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian

Anti-corruption campaigners and MPs have warned that “the kids of oligarchs” may have used their parents’ money to buy the right to live in the UK after it was revealed that the government granted “golden visas” to 46 people aged 21 or under.

The Home Office on Wednesday disclosed that it approved 46 applications for the tier 1 investor visa scheme to those aged 21 or under over the last seven years, following a freedom of information request from Bloomberg.

The golden visa scheme – which was scrapped in February over fears that it had been exploited by Russian oligarchs – was designed to attract wealthy people to the UK and required applicants to invest at least £2m.

Thousands used it to secure fast-track rights to live and work in Britain, and the scheme was particularly popular with Russian and Chinese families.

John Penrose, a Conservative MP who serves as “the prime minister’s anti-corruption champion”, said the revelation raised concerns that golden visas could have been “a loophole for kleptocrats’ children to live gilded lives in London funded by dirty money”.

He added: “If golden visas were granted to the brightest and best young entrepreneurs, Britain will have benefited hugely from the jobs, energy and wealth which they will have created.

“The answer is for the government to publish its long-promised review of golden visas, so we can see what really happened and when. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.”

It was previously revealed that eight Russian oligarchs on the UK sanctions list over their links to Vladimir Putin were also granted golden visas to live in Britain. The Home Office has declined to name the sanctioned individuals who were given visas, and whom Johnson described as having “the blood of the Ukrainian people on their hands”. ...

#uk #WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK TORIES?!#russian oligarchs #corruption #fuck the tories #russia #evil #tories #conservative politics

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catgirl-kaiju · 6 months

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reminder that the US government was perfectly willing to ignore the actions of the nazis until imperial japan directly attacked one of its military bases. before that, all of the warning signs of genocide were ignored and war in Europe, Oceania, and East Asia were all treated like something that wasn't their problem, and refugees from fascist states were routinely turned away at our borders. the main reason they helped stop the holocaust was because nazi germany was an ally of imperial japan.

our government has always been this way. unless isreal directly attacks the US military or US government, it is unlikely that they will do anything to stop this genocide and will keep aiding in it against the wishes of their people. because to the US, war crimes are only war crimes when our enemies do them, and the same goes for genocide.

if UN is worth anything, they will call for the leaders of isreal and the leaders of all countries aiding them to be brought before the Hague. as far as i am concerned, the US, UK, and isreal are part of a new axis of evil that goes unimpeded by an organization that should have prevented this from ever happening again and that has ignored/failed to stop countless genocides and war crimes.

our government is run by ghouls who do not represent us in an oligarchical government that calls itself democratic. they need to be stopped.

#politics #us politics #world politics #palestine #free palestine #never again

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brf-rumortrackinganon · 1 month

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“it is all those red flags in Harry's security assessment that makes me think the BRF keeps closer tabs on him than has been alleged in the press.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was Pegasus spyware on his devices, simply because he is so thick that he can easily stumble into dumb shit. I can just see him jumping on a private plane or yacht with ties to a Russian oligarch sanctioned in the UK / US because he’s too busy smoking and hallucinating about “world peace” to put two-and-two together.

In addition to Russians going on a purchasing spree in the UK, the UK upper classes have been courted by the Russian oligarchs for more than a generation. Their now-grown kids all went to UK private schools and both the kids and parents made friends. While the UK is now having a reconning about that dubious integration paved by dirty money, I honestly expect that it all went over Harry’s head. He’ll only think of connections and dollar bills. What do you mean by compliance and national security risks? I’m the son of the King!

Exactly. And we've already seen that he and Meghan don't understand what national security or risk is just by their behavior:

whining on international television about the loss of privilege

describing non-public and private spaces being lived in and used by members of the royal family

describing habits, preferences, routines, and patterns of family members

broadcasting their whereabouts and travel plans

rolling down their car windows in motorcades and processions to be seen

selling their grievances to the highest bidder

They're so narcissistic that when complete strangers come up to them, they think "people love me! I'm important!" and neither one of them understand, or realize, that part of William's and Kate's reluctance to be hugging complete strangers is because of the risk that comes with their positions. They have to be guarded in some respects because their physical wellbeing depends on it. Especially in today's environment where cameras, tracking devices, and recording devices can be smaller than a baby's fingernail.

Harry and Meghan don't get that, or they don't care, because it gets in the way of their ultimate goal: fame, fortune, popularity, and good press coverage.

#ask #brf #sussexes

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year

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Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

#russian propaganda #us propaganda #propaganda #caitlin johnstone #manufacturing consent #misinformation #disinformation #media disinformation

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qsycomplainsalot · 2 months

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I'd like to say, I really appreciate you taking an unapologetic stance on the French Revolution. In the US and UK there has been a renewed push in pop history and in fiction to portray the revolution as unjust, or as racist, sexist, undemocratic etc. etc. I even remember my underfunded public school history textbook back in the day having a big sob story about antoinette and the king and the nobles, trying to make us feel sorry for them. The recent addition of vague social justice language to discredit the idea of overthrowing oligarchs and unelected rulers makes it quite clear (to me, at least) that this is simply the fears of the ruling class manifesting themselves again. While certainly the revolution is Morally Complicated when taken as a whole, I feel no compunction to hand wring about the destruction of monarchy by any means necessary. SO, thank you!

That's a bit of an odd comment because I don't think I defend it that much ? And also it's funny because in France we're definitely not told enough about, and it ends up coming off better than it was. The thing is the first revolution was kind of an overall failure, it blundered along into achieving great things until monarchy returned in one way or another. The actual process of getting to actual democracy took almost a hundred years and you could argue even by the third republic we weren't there. But it got the ideals of enlightenment philosophers out of parlors and into government policies, it DECIDEDLY set a new tone for the relation between the people and the kings, and generally was a good precedent to dangle over the head of future monarchs. It broke the back of a royal dynasty that had been ruling France uninterrupted for eight hundred years, showing people that something else was possible. But it was also a brutal mess of conflicting ideologies and political reprisals. It never had a single effective government and did not in any way match the idea of progressivism tumblr bloggers assign to it. Of course all the while having to deal with external factors such as England bankrolling the whole of Europe to attack us because they wanted to have their backyard safe while taking over a third of the world's landmass. So like yeah I tend to defend the revolution against right wing idiots who try to make it seem like the French nobility didn't have it coming for hundreds of years, but I'm also gonna remind the people shipping St-Just and Robespierre that those were actual, deeply flawed and murderous bastards operating a repressive government "in the name of liberty". It's not a simple period of history to characterize, just like Napoleon's reign which if you ask me is the one with a real smear campaign run against it in the anglo world.

#history

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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EU to Facebook: 'Drop Dead'

A leak from the European Data Protection Board reveals that the EU’s top privacy regulator is about to overrule the Irish Data Protection Commission and declare Facebook’s business model illegal, banning surveillance-based ads without explicit consent:

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-win-personalized-ads-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-declared-illegal

In some ways, this is unsurprising. Since the GDPR’s beginning, it’s been crystal clear that the intention of the landmark privacy regulation was to extinguish commercial surveillance and ring down the curtain on “consent theater” — the fiction that you “agree” to be spied on by clicking “I agree” or just by landing on a web-page that has a link to some fine-print.

Under the GDPR, the default for data-collection is meaningful consent, meaning that a company that wants to spy on you and then sell or use the data it gathers has to ask you about each piece of data they plan to capture and each use they plan to make of it.

These uses have to be individually enumerated, and the user has to actively opt into giving up each piece of data and into each use of that data. That means that if you’re planning to steal 700 pieces of information from me and then use it in 700 ways, you need to ask me 1,400 questions and get a “Yes” to each of them.

What’s more, I have to be given a single tickbox at the start of this process that says, “No to all,” and then I have to be given access to all the features of the site or service.

The point of this exercise is to reveal consent theater for the sham it is. For all that apologists for commercial surveillance insist that “people like ads, so long as they’re well-targeted” and “the fact that people use high-surveillance services like Facebook shows a ‘revealed preference’ for being spied on,” we all know that no one likes surveillance.

There’s empirical proof of this! When Apple added one-click tracker opt-out on its Ios platform, 96% of users opted out, costing Facebook more than $10b in the first year (talk about a ‘revealed preference!’) (of course, Apple only opted those users out of tracking by its rivals, and secretly continued highly invasive, nonconsenual tracking of its customers):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Properly enforced, the GDPR would have upended the order of the digital world: any argument about surveillance between product managers at a digital firm would have been settled in favor of privacy, because the pro-privacy side could argue that no one would give consent, and the very act of asking would scare off lots of users.

But the GDPR wasn’t properly enforced, thanks to structural problems with European federalism itself. The first line of GDPR enforcement came from privacy regulators in whatever country a privacy-violator called home. That meant that when Big Tech companies violated the GDPR, they’d have to account for themselves to the privacy regulator in Ireland.

For multinational corporations, Ireland is what old-time con-artists used to call a “made town,” where the cop on the beat is in on the side of the criminals. Ireland’s decision to transform itself into a tax haven means that it can’t afford to upset the corporations that fly Irish flags of convenience and maintain the pretense that all their profits are floating in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea.

That’s because there are plenty of other EU countries that compete with Ireland in the international race to the bottom on corporate governance: Malta, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Cyprus, etc (and of course, there’s post-Brexit UK, where the plan is to create an unregulated haven for the worst, wealthiest companies in the world).

All this means that seeking Irish justice from a corporation that wronged you is like asking a court in Moscow to punish an oligarch’s commercial empire on your behalf. Irish regulators are either “dingo babysitters” (guards in league with the guarded) or resource-starved into ineffectual torpor.

That’s how Facebook got away with violating the GDPR for so many years. The company hid behind the laughable fairy-tale that it didn’t need our consent to spy on us because it had a “legitimate purpose” for its surveillance, namely, that it was contractually obliged to spy on us thanks to the “agreement” we clicked on when we signed up for the service.

That is, you and Facebook had entered into a contract whereby Facebook promised you that it would spy on you, and if it didn’t spy on you, it would be violating that promise.

Har.

But while the GDPR has a structural weakness — allowing corporations to choose to be regulated in countries that can’t afford to piss them off — it also has a key strength: the private right of action, that is, the right of individuals to sue companies that violate the law, rather than having to convince a public prosecutor to take up their case.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

The private right of action is vital to any privacy regulation, which is why companies fight it so hard. Whenever a privacy bill with a private right of action comes up, they tell scare-stories about “ambulance chasers” who’ll “clog up the system,” trotting out urban legends like the McDonald’s Hot Coffee story:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

But here we are, in the last days of 2022, and the private right of action is about to do what the Irish regulators wouldn’t do: force Facebook to obey the law. For that, we can thank Max Schrems and the nonprofit he founded, noyb.

Schrems, you may recall, is the Austrian activist, who, as a Stanford law student, realized that EU law barred American tech companies from sending their surveillance data on Europeans to US data-centers, which the NSA and other spy agencies treated as an arm of their own surveillance projects:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/16/text-adventures-resurgent/#nein

Schrems brought a case against the Irish regulator to the EU’s top privacy authority, arguing that it had failed its duty by ruling that Facebook’s “contractual obligation” excuse held water. According to the leaked report, Schrems has succeeded, which means, once again, Facebook’s business model is illegal.

Facebook will doubtless appeal, but the writing is on the wall here: it’s the end of the line for surveillance advertising in Europe, an affluent territory with 500m+ residents. This decision will doubtless give a tailwind to other important privacy cases in the EU, like Johnny Ryan’s case against the ad-tech consortium IAB over its “audience taxonomy” codes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/16/inside-the-clock-tower/#inference

It’s also likely good news for Schrems’ other ongoing cases, like the one he’s brought against Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb

Facebook has repeatedly threatened to leave the EU if it is required to stop breaking the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/22/uncivvl/#fb-v-eu

This is a pretty implausible threat, growing less plausible by the day. The company keeps delivering bad news to investors, who are not mollified by Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to rescue the company by convincing all of humanity to spend the rest of their lives as highly surveilled, legless, sexless, low-polygon cartoon characters:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/12/06/why-meta-platforms-stock-dove-today/

Zuckerberg and his entire senior team have seen their net worth plummet with Meta’s share price, and that means the company needs to pay engineers with actual dollars, rather than promises of shares, which kills the massive wage-bill discount the company has enjoyed. This is not a company that can afford to walk away from Europe!

Between Apple’s mobile (third-party) tracker-blocking and the EU calling time on surveillance ads, things are looking grim for Facebook. You love to see it! But things could get even worse, and soon, thanks to the double-edged sword of “network effects.”

Facebook is a network effects business: people join the service to socialize with the people who are already there — then more people join to socialize with them. But what network effects give, they can also take away: a service that gets more valuable when a new user signs up loses value when that user leaves.

This is beautifully explained in danah boyd’s “What if failure is the plan?” which recounts boyd’s experiences watching MySpace unravel as key nodes in its social graph disappeared when users quit: “Failure of social media sites tends to be slow then fast”:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

Facebook long understood this, which is why it spent years creating artificial “switching costs” — penalties it could impose on users who quit, such as the loss of their family photos:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

This is why Facebook and other tech giants are so scared of interoperability, and why they are so furious about the new EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will force them to allow new services to connect to their platforms, so that users who quit Big Tech won’t have to lose their friends or data:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises

An interoperable Facebook would make it easy to leave social media by removing the penalties Facebook imposes on its disloyal users, and the EU’s privacy framework means that when they flee to a smaller safe haven, they won’t have to worry about commercial surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

But what about advertising-supported media? Sure, being spied on sucks, but a subscription-first media landscape is a world where “the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free”:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/

Ironically, killing surveillance ads is good news for ad-driven media. Surveillance-based ad-targeting is nowhere near as effective as Google, Facebook and the other ad-tech companies claim (these companies are compulsive liars, it would be amazing if the only time they told the truth is when they were boasting about their products!):

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

And consent-theater or no, targeted ads reach fewer users every day, thanks to ad- blockers, AKA, “the biggest boycott in world history”:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

And when a publisher does manage to display a targeted ad, they get screwed. The Googbook dupololy is a crooked affair, with the two tech companies illegally colluding (via the Jedi Blue conspiracy) to divert money from publishers to their own pockets:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Targeted ads are a cesspit of ad-fraud. 15% of all ad revenues are just unaccounted for:

https://twitter.com/swodinsky/status/1511172472762163202

The remaining funds aren’t any more trustworthy. Ad-tech is a bezzle (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/

As Tim Hwang foretold in his essential Subprime Attention Crisis, the pretense that targeted ads are wildly effective has been slowly but surely losing ground to the wider awareness of the fraud behind the system, and a reckoning is at hand:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Experiments with contextual ads (ads based on the content of the page you’re looking at, not on your behavior and demographics) have found them to about as effective in generated clicks and sales as surveillance ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/29/taken-in-context/#creep-me-not

But this is misleading. Contextual ads don’t require consent opt-in (because they’re not based on your data) and they don’t drive users to install blockers the way creepy surveillance ads do, so lots more people will see a contextual ad than a surveillance one. Thus, even if contextual ads generate slightly less money per reader or viewer, they generate far more money overall, because they are aren’t blocked.

Even better for publishers: contextual ads don’t erode their own rate cards. Today, when you visit a high-quality publisher like the Washington Post, many ad brokers bid to show you an ad, but only one wins the auction. However, all the others have tagged you as a “Washington Post reader,” and they can sell that to bottom-feeder junk sites. That is, they can collude with Tabooleh or its rivals to offer advertisers a chance to advertise to Post readers at a fraction of what the Post charges. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the Post’s own ad revenues are drained.

This doesn’t apply with contextual ads. Indeed, none of the tech giants’ much-vaunted “data advantage” — the largely overstated value of knowing what you did online 10 or 20 years ago, the belief in which keeps new companies out of the market — applies to context ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

The transformative power of banning surveillance advertising goes beyond merely protecting our privacy. It also largely answers the case for “link taxes” (pseudo-copyright systems that let giant media companies decide who can link to them and charge for the privilege).

The underlying case for link taxes, snippet taxes, etc, is that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s content (by letting their users talk about and quote the news), when the reality is that Big Tech is stealing their money (through ad-fraud):

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-isnt-stealing-news-publishers-content-a97306884a6b

Unrigging the ad-tech market is a much better policy than establishing a link-tax, like the Democrats are poised to do with their Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA):

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2022/12/06/jcpa-opponents-spring-into-action-to-block-ndaa-inclusion-00072602

It’s easy to understand why the monopoly/private-equity-dominated news industry wants JCPA, rather than a clean ad market. The JCPA just imposes a tax on the crooked ad-tech giants that is paid to the largest media companies, while a fair ad market would reward the media outlets that invested most in news (and thus in expensive, unionized news-gathering reporters).

Indeed, the JCPA only works if the ad-tech market remains corrupt: the excess Big Tech rents that Big News wants to claim here are the product of a rigged system. Unrig the system and there won’t be any money to pay the link tax with.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_%2841118883004%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A theater proscenium. Over the proscenium, in script, are the words 'Consent Theatre.' On the screen is an image of Mark Zuckerberg standing in front of the words 'Data Privacy.' He is gesturing expansively. A targeting reticle is centered on his face. The reticle is made of the stars from the EU flag.]

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