Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent
“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.
Deep State To Remove Joe Biden At DNC In July
Watch Alex Jones Predict Disease X Back In 2014!
It has been at minimum a whole decade since Alex Jones began warning the planet about the globalist eugenicist agenda to kill millions of people across the world ahead of the Great Reset scheme to rule over the world using a technocratic spy grid.
“They’re going to stage terror attacks, they’re going to blame it on us, they’re going to come after anybody that criticizes them, and if you roll over to them they win”
– Alex Jones exactly 10 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/0z7jun0eph— INFOWARS (@infowars) January 17, 2024
Financial Surveillance: Feds Flagged Banks Transactions With Terms Like ‘MAGA’ & ‘TRUMP’
The federal government has flagged terms like “MAGA” and “Trump” for financial institutions if those terms were included in transactions, according to the House Judiciary Committee.
The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government claimed Wednesday it had obtained documents proving the FBI was flagging these terms as well as “individuals who shopped at stores like Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods, or purchased religious texts like a bible, may also have had their transactions flagged.”
“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious concerns about the FBI’s respect for fundamental civil liberties,” the subcommittee stated in a press release.
We now know the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP,” to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 17, 2024
What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop. pic.twitter.com/jjRaVNItWz
“In light of these revelations, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) has requested transcribed interviews from Peter Sullivan, Senior Private Sector Partner for Outreach in the Strategic Partner Engagement Section of the FBI, and Noah Bishoff, former Director of the Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations Division of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).”
In the letter to Bishoff, Jordan explained the documents obtained by the committee show that in the wake of January 6, 2021, FinCEN distributed materials to banks directing them to search for “extremism indicators” in transactions like “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
“In other words, FinCEN urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression,” Jordan wrote.
Jordan also explained that the committee has evidence FinCEN presented slides to banks instructing them to flag firearm purchases at sporting supplies stores like Cabela’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus—and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights—FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors,” Jordan wrote.
“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties,” he added.
This comes after Newsweek reported in October that the FBI had created a new “extremism” category to track mainly Trump supporters ahead of the 2024 election.
Notably, the number of domestic extremism cases has dropped since Jan. 6, but journalist William Arkin told Newsweek that “sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence.”
Read Jordan’s letter to Bishoff:
BREAKING: Johns Hopkins Wargames Disease X Killing 150 Million People, Collapsing Government
Alex Jones warns of the globalist agenda to kill hundreds of millions of people so the elite can come in as “saviors” and enslave the remaining inhabitants of Earth.
BREAKING VIDEO: John Kerry Confronted By Reporters For His Carbon Fraud
Alex Jones presents footage of Rebel News’ Avi Yemini confronting John Kerry about the hypocrisy of the former Secretary of State having a massive carbon footprint by traveling to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum’s annual summit.
Watch: The Most Ridiculous 75 Seconds Of Bullsh*t From Davos Yet On ‘Ecocide’
Just when you thought you had heard it all…
This lady (we are presuming she/they is/are a lady) – who looks like she has not missed a meal in her life – explains – with no sense of irony or shame – that farming the land, fishing for food, and worse still ‘making money’ is now on par with mass murder or genocide.
Jojo Mehta – founder of ‘Stop Ecocide Now’ – explains in her upper-class English accent to her ultra-rich peers in Davos that:
“We have this cultural, very ingrained habit of not taking damage to nature as seriously as we take damage to people or property.”
Her goal is to have “mass damage and destruction of nature” legally recognized as “a serious crime.”
“With human rights, mass murder and genocide are serious crimes, but there is no equivalent in the environmental space.”
“Unlike an international crime like genocide that involves a specific intent, with ecocide, what we see is that people are trying to do is make money, is farm, is fish… and what’s missing is an awareness of the side effects and collateral damage that happens…”
Enjoy…
Latest buzzword just dropped from the Devil’s den in Davos.
— Kat Kanada (@KatKanada_TM) January 16, 2024
Farming, fishing and making money is now called “Ecocide.”
So basically if you want to live, you’re committing a crime if these people get their way.
???☠️pic.twitter.com/6hTQMlEsVe
You literally cannot make this shit up! The socials quickly responded…
I guess ecocide doesn’t include killing whales to put up windmills.
— Jeff Flinn (@JeffFlinn_) January 17, 2024
That’s right, NetZero is net population growth of zero. That’s what they were after all along, no more euphemisms about carbon emissions, they’re moving on.
— Bulagan (@Bulagan1996) January 17, 2024
Ecocide is actually Eliteocide—which is allowing unelected elites, to tell farmers to stop farming, fisher to stop fishing, miners to stop mining—when you allow those things to happen, that is when you starve, unrests happens and society collapses.
— Christopher Olguin (@cjo_olguin) January 17, 2024
Because you listen to the…
These people are evil.
— Paul G ???? (@Paulgman47) January 17, 2024
“Do as I say, not as I do…”