Quote:A German doctor and prominent online anti-lockdown activist faced an excessive arrest as police barged into his house during a YouTube live he was streaming from his residence.

The arrest appeared like it hit Dr. Andreas Noack out of the blue as he was too shocked to even respond. The whole scene itself, which was captured during the live streaming, shocked viewers that were already concerned about the recent decimation of civil liberties as Dr. Noack had to lay on the ground while the police were continuously yelling at him.

Reports state that the reasons for Dr. Noack’s arrest seem unclear and not officially stated. That being said, it is worth noting that the arrest took place right after the “Infection Protection Law” was passed amidst a huge public pushback against it. Dr. Noack was also notorious in the government’s eyes as he was offering medical treatment to anti-lock down protestors who were injured during protests.

The “Infection Protection Law,” simply put, allows the German government to take decisions that restrict personal freedom and fundamental rights that the country’s very own constitution offers.

The German government, until the law’s passing, primarily relied on decrees to control its citizens and enforce lockdowns. But after intense backlash, calling the method of relying on decrees unconstitutional, the Infection Protection Law was made to come into play.

This law allows the government to even go to the lengths of restricting people who are either infected or are suspected to be infected from practicing certain professions. What’s more, the law also helps the government impose more curfews and lockdowns across the country.

Over time, lockdowns have negatively impacted the livelihoods of many, because of which there has been a steadily growing anti-lockdown sentiment across Germany, particularly online. This explains the intense pushback against the law and numerous anti-lockdown protests which the country’s government is trying to vehemently suppress.

Dr. Andreas Noack was a prominent critic of the law and lockdowns, creating much content about the issue online.

Based on what little information we could officially obtain about the arrest, it was found that Dr. Noack was being investigated for being “non-compliant with the COVID-19 lockdown laws enacted by the German government.”

Quote:A citizen journalist who reported suspicious goings-on in Wuhan in the early days of the coronavirus saga has been prosecuted by the government. She is among the few who have resurfaced after facing such charges, many have disappeared without a trace.

In China, free speech and free media are not a thing. The state-run media is not a reliable source of information. Therefore, in the early days of the pandemic, the world had to rely on citizen journalists for credible and first-hand information about what they were seeing. However, these journalists soon started getting arrested and disappearing within the country’s obscure judicial system.

Zhang Zhan is one of those that emerged and has been formally charged. She was arrested in May and accused of the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles.”

The indictment shows that the Shanghai prosecutor’s office claims that she posted “a large amount of false information.”

Quote:The UK’s intelligence agencies are collecting data on the movement of people to provide the government with insights on whether they are complying with the lockdown. The minute-by-minute accurate data analysis has helped the government make decisions regarding the pandemic and such state-run mass surveillance has wide-reaching privacy implications at a time when civil liberties are at threat.

The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) analysts, now working in the Cabinet Office in Downing Street, are going through droves of data to provide the Boris Johnson administration minute-by-minute reports on the behavior of citizens.

Aside from people’s movements, the analysts are also looking at job and vacation destination searches. The idea is supposedly to help the government make decisions regarding the pandemic, such as whether to enforce a national lockdown past December 2 and gives an insight into the amount of data that GCHQ has access to.

Quote:Canada’s online magazine The Tyee is starting to publish reports based on a stash of documents containing some 3,000 pages that detail a social media surveillance program put in place by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The project is codenamed Wide Awake and it took the media outlet over a year to receive these documents, having sued under the public records requests policy. The project seems to be named after one found in the X-Men fictional universe called “Project Wideawake” that deals with how to best control and use “mutants” that had started appearing around the world.

One presentation found among the documents contains such messages as, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it” – which observers think implies the RCMP feel their behavior is justified, as their surveillance of the internet cannot violate something that doesn’t exist.

With this specific project, the RCMP managed to keep the public in the dark about contracts it signs to implement Wide Awake. The RCMP claimed national security exception, and eliminated transparency that would have been provided through public procurement and bidding. As this law enforcement organization sought to sole-source contract Babel X or a tool similar, the RCMP told Public Services and Procurement Canada that making the project public would jeopardize the country’s border and national security and therefore asked to be granted a national security exception.

(11-20-2020 07:54 PM)solohawks Wrote:  That's the Germany we know and love

(11-20-2020 07:54 PM)solohawks Wrote:  That's the Germany we know and love

(11-21-2020 10:49 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Ever since, “Big Brother” has been something that existed mostly in the imagination, at least for Americans. A warning of things that might happen one day, off in the distant future.
Well, here we are. Good luck!

Quote:The UK government plans to provide the rather dystopian-sounding digital “freedom passes” to people who test negative for COVID twice in a week. The plan is an attempt to “allow” people a shot at a “normal life” before a vaccine becomes available.

The government is still working on the plan. Once it comes into effect, people who test negative for COVID will be given a document that will allow them to move around in public with no issue. People who earn the pass will be allowed to move about mask-less and even attend social gatherings with friends and family without having to observe social distancing.

According to sources, the “freedom pass” could be stored in smartphones.

“They will allow someone to wander down the streets, and if someone else asks why they are not wearing a mask, they can show the card, letter, or an app,” a source close to the issue told The Telegraph.

Quote:“Independent fact-checkers” – i.e., third party companies contracted by Facebook, Twitter, Google and others to, all too often arbitrarily decide what is true and what is false, are at it again – this time taking on two Oxford scientists.

Their article about a study looking at the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of face masks when worn to prevent coronavirus infection, originally published in The Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly magazine, and shared on Facebook, got flagged as “false information.”

This happened to the consternation of its authors, one of them being Professor Carl Heneghan, who posted about the incident on Twitter where he has some 70,000 followers.

Heneghan said that no information contained in the article was false, indicating that he is aware a similar sort of censorship is happening to other Facebook users, and wondering, “What has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech?”

What happened here has been happening since early in the year: giant social platforms’ feverish censorship of information around the Covid pandemic, and this is not the first time that reputable scientists and doctors have fallen victim to it.

Quote:Former Senator Jim DeMint was censored by Facebook for discussing the censorship of scientific articles. Facebook is labeling scientific studies as false information if they do not match their chosen narrative.

“My friend, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, was locked out of Twitter for daring to tell the scientific truth on masks: they don’t work at stopping COVID. He simply shared the news of the long-anticipated Danish study of over 6,000 randomized people which came to the conclusion: ‘A recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, incident infection compared with no mask recommendation,’” DeMint wrote in the censored Facebook post.

The post included a screenshot of Fitton’s post on Parler where he announced the censorship on Twitter. The post read, “I’ve been locked out of Twitter for 12 hours for posting this accurate tweet.”

DeMint’s post was “fact-checked” by Facebook’s independent fact-checker Health Feedback, that Facebook consideres a higher authority than science journals. The fact-check label said, “Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.”

Quote:The French government is being criticized for attempting to limit press freedoms and free speech. The issue is rather weird from a country that has recently been championing itself as supporting freedom of speech – but not so weird considering the various online censorship laws that lawmakers keep trying to pass in the country.

The French government recently passed a new security law containing a clause that banned the filming of law enforcement officers. The provision makes it a crime to “disseminate by any means or medium whatsoever, the image of the face or any other identifying element of an officer when engaged in a police operation.”

Even journalists reporting on police issues would not be allowed to film officers on duty. Breaking the law could result in a one-year prison sentence and fines of up to €45,000 ($53,000).

Authorities have already arrested someone for breaking the new law. On Tuesday, during a protest of the new law, a France 3 journalist was arrested outside the National Assembly. The officers did not care that he was a journalist with the required press credentials.

Quote:Political commentator Candace Owens accused YouTube of being “batshit woke” after it removed her podcast about gender identity. It is not clear why YouTube suddenly found the video offensive after being on the platform for a year.

On Friday, Owens tweeted that YouTube had removed her video because she said “men are not women and women are not men.” According to her remarks in the video are not so-called “hate speech” but the truth.

“I honestly cannot even believe how absolutely batshit woke you have to be to believe basic truth to be “hate speech,” she wrote.

Quote:Facebook, Twitter, and Google will work with the governments of the UK and Canada and “fact-checking” organizations to censor the spread of coronavirus vaccine skepticism online. Vaccine-critical conversations have increased since Moderna and Pfizer announced their vaccine candidates and governments and Big Tech want it suppressed.

The initiative is to be coordinated by Full Fact; a fact-checking non-profit based in the UK.

The UK and Canada’s governments are also supporting the initiative, as well as other fact-checking websites based in Spain, India, and Argentina.

Until the project fully launches in January 2021, it will be funded by Facebook.

(11-20-2020 08:47 PM)shere khan Wrote:  Coming soon to a blue state near you.

National Democratic Socialists

(11-21-2020 10:49 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Ever since, “Big Brother” has been something that existed mostly in the imagination, at least for Americans. A warning of things that might happen one day, off in the distant future.

Well, here we are. Good luck!

(11-21-2020 11:16 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(11-21-2020 10:49 AM)Native Georgian Wrote:  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. Ever since, “Big Brother” has been something that existed mostly in the imagination, at least for Americans. A warning of things that might happen one day, off in the distant future.
Well, here we are. Good luck!

Any American who thinks Big Brother is off in the distant future is kidding him/herself.