The US Military’s Vision for State Censorship
In
March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the
Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference
on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference
brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces,
including officials from the New York Police Department, and
representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.
This
meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went
unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council
recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the
proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army
officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of
Homeland Security.The
Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the highest levels of
the state, has been a key partner in the social media companies’
censorship of left-wing views. Most notably, Facebook acted on a tip
from the Atlantic Council when it shut down the official event page for
an anti-fascist demonstration in Washington on the anniversary of last
year’s neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville.
Confident
that none of the thousands of journalists in Washington will question,
or even report, what he writes, Watts lays out, from the standpoint of
the repressive apparatus of the state and the financial oligarchy it
defends, why censorship is necessary.
The
central theme of the report is “sovereignty,” or the state’s ability to
impose its will upon the population. This “sovereignty,” Watts writes,
faces “greater challenges now than it ever has in the past,” due to the
confluence between growing political opposition to the state and the
internet’s ability to quickly spread political dissent.
http://www.unz.com/article/the-us-militarys-vision-for-state-censorship/
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