Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Chairman Mark Warner is very concerned about the U.S. government inability to control, restrict and censor the information within the TikTok social media platform.

As outlined in this Face the Nation interview with Margaret Brennan, Chairman Warner states it is very alarming that China may permit content that is against the interests of the U.S. government to control it.  Additionally, by law, the Chinese platform “has to be willing to turn over data to the Communist Party“.

Now, if you find yourself thinking, how is this different from U.S. laws that force Twitter, Facebook, Apple or Google to turn over user data to the DOJ/FBI, well, you are probably too smart for this regime narrative and should officially consider yourself a dissident American intellectual. Just sayin’.

The bottom line is very simple when you look at TikTok from the position of the U.S. surveillance state.  The Dept of Homeland Security can only monitor TikTok content, they cannot do anything to modify, remove, censor or control the content, as a result TikTok exists as an existential threat.  WATCH:

[Transcript] –  MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He joins us from King George Virginia. Good morning to you, Senator.

SEN. MARK WARNER: Good morning Margaret.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It was a pretty intense five hours of questioning of Tiktok CEO this past week. Your bipartisan bill has White House support, and it would deal with Tiktok by giving the Commerce Department power to review and potentially ban technology flagged by US intelligence as a credible threat. Will it pass in a divided Congress?

SEN. WARNER: Well, Margaret, will – we’re now up to 22 Senators. 11 Democrats. 11 Republicans. We’ve had strong interest from the House. I think they wanted to get through their hearing. And clearly  while I appreciated Mr. Chew’s testimony, he just couldn’t answer the basic question. At the end of the day, Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company Bytedance. And by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data to the Communist Party. Or one of my bigger fears, we got 150 million Americans on Tiktok average of about 90 minutes a day, and how that channel could be used for propaganda purposes –

MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.

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The installed occupant of the White House said something today that is just brutally false on its face.

From the words typed into the teleprompter of Joe Biden you hear, “No losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead, the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.” Who the hell does Biden think are paying those “fees”? Those fees paid into banks, and then out of banks, from all around the nation are paid by the people using the bank, that’s taxpayers.

The United States government does not create a single dollar of revenue. They transfer revenue from people to processes and systems of government. Charles Payne has a good perspective on this entire dynamic. {Direct Rumble Link} WATCH:

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BREAKING NEWS – The U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Board, FDIC and Joe Biden collectively announce that *all* depositors with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will have access to their funds – regardless of amount deposited.  Also, all senior bank management has been terminated.

This announced action appears to cover those under FDIC protection ($250k or less) and those above FDIC protection (deposits greater than $250k).  The only vulnerability is that SVB “shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected.”

WASHINGTON DC – The following statement was released by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell, and FDIC Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg:

Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system. This step will ensure that the U.S. banking system continues to perform its vital roles of protecting deposits and providing access to credit to households and businesses in a manner that promotes strong and sustainable economic growth.

After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.

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In a Republican administration the leftist media would be going bananas asking why the Federal Trade Commission is requiring Twitter to notify them of which journalists have had access to internal communication files.  Alas, with a Democrat administration in office, the FTC demand is not an issue.

It would appear the mechanisms of government are aligned to fight back against any sunlight that might be provided upon the government manipulation of the social media platform.

In a profound display of institutional hubris, the U.S. government claims they are concerned about user privacy as the justification for their involvement.

In addition to the U.S. government demanding to know who may have reviewed the Twitter company communication with the U.S. government, the FTC is also looking for a deposition from Twitter CEO Elon Musk about the status of the company.

(Via Wall Street Journal) – WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.

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Ugh, it makes me sick to see these schemes as they are constructed and yet feel helpless to stop them from organizing.  Remember which media outlets push the PR campaigns of the U.S. Govt.  (1) CNN drives Dept of State; (2) Washington Post drives CIA; and (3) NYT/Politico advance the interests of the domestic intelligence apparatus.

With that in mind, here comes the Intelligence Community laying the groundwork for reauthorization of the FISA-702 surveillance system on American citizens.

They are so damned transparent in their agenda, the stenographers have even dropped “FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as the term within the construct.  Now they are just calling it “702 reauthorization.”

(VIA POLITICO) – The intelligence community has a critical congressional ally in its bid to reauthorize a sweeping warrantless surveillance program. However, even he thinks its officials aren’t making a convincing enough case.

“One of the things the community’s got to do a better job of is explaining, in practical non-classified terms, how valuable this tool is,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a recent brief interview. “And they’ve not done that as well as they should.”

Warner sits at the heart of what will be a months-long, knockout debate about whether to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program, known as Section 702, by the end-of-year deadline. The program is designed to gather the electronic communications of foreigners abroad, but has the potential to sweep up those of Americans.

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The battle within cyberspace continues, with mainstream media willing to use every sketchy source possible in order to maintain the great pretending.

As many major stories have shown in the past few years, the big battle over human control is taking place on social media platforms as they continue to be manipulated by government agencies.  The Twitter Files released have shown just how extensive the government manipulation of information has become.

The U.S. State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Defense Dept, and a host of ancillary networked agencies and public-private partnership all occupy this space.  Essentially, it is a fight for control of the public psyche.

In addition to the Twitter Files, stories averse to the interests of the state (Hunter Biden laptop) and fake stories created in the interest of the state (Trump-Russia) are all manipulated by the network of intelligence agencies, quasi government actors and the social media platforms.  This is not debated any longer. There is overwhelming evidence of this reality now.

It is into this context that the Associated Press now promotes a story (with extremely sketchy sourcing) claiming that too much “pro-Trump” support exists on Twitter, and too much anti-DeSantis activity exists on Twitter, for that to be an authentic representation of reality.  You see, inside the eco-chamber of the mainstream media, they cannot reconcile organic outcomes that are the opposite of their worldview.

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For his weekly monologue U.K pundit Neil Oliver weaves the outline of how government officials, and the system creators who support them, have dismissed the inherent ability of humankind to advance itself without external inputs.

Indeed, in the biggest of big pictures the inherent skills and ability of the individual to overcome great challenge is factually a unique attribute to people, human beings.  We were born by the grace of a loving God, with a very unique set of abilities in the universe of life.  We can learn, discover, formulate and achieve great things when we focus as individuals on the issues of greatest priority.  Everything Mr. Oliver states in this monologue is inherently true, naturally true and empirically true.

Ultimately, as governments -consisting of people- and technocrats, again more people, attempt to subvert and replace unique human abilities with technological advancements, you always end at a place where a physical person with skill is needed to accomplish the mechanics of what the designed system cannot provide.

In very real terms, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Klaus Schwab and every person who operates within the system of creating or promoting artificial intelligence, likely does not possess the skill to manage their own household plumbing or repair a broken weld.  WATCH:

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Neil skirts around an issue that I have contemplated for years.  Just as surgeons possess specific sets of skills that can repair a human body, ultimately so too do blue-collar workers hold similar skillsets.

I can easily envision a time (it’s coming soon) when the average population is so critically incapable of fixing things, an outcome of diminished emphasis on doing, that the value of those who can fix things will afford them incredible income.

As technology continues to drive forward, the financial value assigned to irreplaceable physical human labor will ultimately invert.  Surgeons may indeed be replaced by machines, but robots will never be able to fix a leaky roof.  There are just too many variables and the technocrats do not think of such things.

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Independent journalist Matt Taibbi is looking for some additional research assistance [SEE HERE]. Specifically, after going a little deeper on the Twitter Files, Taibbi appears to be recognizing the visibility of the Fourth Branch of Government.  He now needs to package the truth of it, in a way his former tribe will accept.

As a consequence, Taibbi is looking for (1) a reporter or academic with experience researching government contracts, and/or the funding of NGOs or academic research institutions; and (2) an infographics designer, preferably with experience in areas like ecosystem mapping.

Taibbi is a solid and inquisitive research journalist. However, he is still averse to recognizing Chicago Jesus as the originator of the modern issues he is outlining.

The issue of not accepting the Obama network as the structure that underpins the modern political surveillance state is common, even amid the tribe of walkaways from the progressive system.

Give him time, he’ll find see it.

From his current mission as expressed: […] “For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.

In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.

The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian “psychological operation” serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.

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David Sacks is a key advisor to Elon Musk and one of the principal aides to Musk during the purchase and subsequent takeover of Twitter by the billionaire entrepreneur.

There has been an ongoing debate about whether Elon Musk was aware of the U.S. government and intelligence community control over Twitter prior to the purchase; with many people saying there is no way that Musk could not know given the scale of the money involved, $42 billion and the due diligence that generally follows such transactions.

However, in this interview David Sacks explicitly states Mr. Musk had no idea how much operational control and influence the government and intelligence apparatus held over the platform prior to the purchase. [Video prompted to 06:15 segment]

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If Sacks is delivering an accurate assessment of the situation, then taking the issue one step further, it stands to reason that Musk has no idea what the core algorithmic code built into the platform actually consists of.  Additionally, as CTH has long outlined, then Musk has no idea about the data-processing subsidy arrangement that exists on the platform as an outcome of the partnership.

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Interesting background stuff.  The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has scheduled their first committee hearing for Thursday, February 9th at noon [LINK].  There are no details on the agenda for the first meeting; however, there are indications of the seed and targeting process that is being used.

According to a press announcement today from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who is also the Chairman of the select subcommittee, the larger Judiciary Committee is currently taking transcribed testimony from FBI whistleblowers about the political targeting within the Dept of Justice.

Against that backdrop, it is possible -perhaps likely- the agenda for the select subcommittee will be tailored as an outcome of those whistleblower depositions.  This would seem to make sense as the scope of the subcommittee needs to be narrowly tailored and focused on specific operations by government officials.  Using the whistleblower testimony to frame the investigation of the subcommittee makes sense, in that the testimony creates the basis for the investigation to follow.   First, here’s Jordan today:

The FBI whistleblower depositions will likely form the first material for the Select Subcommittee to discuss.   This structure provides a two-prong approach toward sunlight on the larger issues at stake.

The main House Judiciary Committee has constitutional oversight over the DOJ and by consequence the FBI.  The detailed discoveries are then passed down to the select subcommittee for further investigation.  Hopefully, everyone can see the benefit to that approach.  Judiciary holds bigger issues, then hands-off the smaller, perhaps deeper individual cases to the subcommittee for follow-up.

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