While ordinary Americans find themselves at their most vulnerable, the deep state is salivating. Rahm Emmanuel’s famous dictum, “never let a crisis go to waste,” applies equally if not more so to artificial and exaggerated crises. Just as 9/11 gave us the patriot act, so will Covid-19 be used to ram through elevated measures of surveillance and control.
Former Bush official Jack Goldsmith and his co-author Andrew Keane Woods describe exactly how the deep state will use Covid-19 to enhance and consolidate the trend of internet censorship that began in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election.
Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. [The Atlantic]
As with all crises, Covid-19 has been used to push previously uncrossed boundaries of censorship. One example of note is the proposed censorship of the “Wayback Machine.” The Wayback Machine is a device that archives the history of the internet so users can access deleted sites, ensuring internet transparency and accountability.
As mainstream websites were forced to delete any information on Covid that conflicted with the ever-changing narratives of the so-called “health-experts,” internet users were taking to the wayback machine to access this deleted information.
Researchers at MIT took exception to the public’s ability to access forbidden information on covid, and even lobbied the wayback machine to delete information conflicting with the “expert consensus” entirely.
The old saw that the “internet is forever” might apply to an off-color joke posted online 10 years ago, but evidently it does not apply to information that conflicts with the “health experts” ever changing narrative consensus on Covid-19.
The original Atlantic article continues:
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
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