Many of the benefits from keeping Terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private corporations suck up massive amounts of Homeland Security cash as l… - Glenn Greenwald

To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.

[About Twitter being banned in Brazil, Pavel Durov being arrested in France, and Rumble being blocked in Brazil and France:] You see this rapidly escalating, unfolding extremely menacing scheme of censorship which is 'You either remove every dissident, every idea, that we don't like, that we deem false, that we deem harmful, or we will, in the case of France, imprison you and your executives the minute you step foot into the EU, or we'll just block your entire platform from being available in our country at all. And we will only allow those platforms that maintain a closed system of information for our citizens to hear and say only what we think they should be hearing and saying.' This is happening in the democratic world, the obstensibly Western Democratic world. I cannot do anything more in terms of words to express how extreme, how severe, and how dangerous this trend is. We could see it coming for several years now and it is here.

The level of historical ignorance and/or jingostic American exceptionalism necessary to believe this is impossible to describe. Compared to what the CIA has done to dozens of other countries since the end of World War II, and what it continues to do, watching Americans cast Russian interference in the 2016 election through online bots and email hacking (even if one believes every claim made about it) as some sort of unique and unprecedented crime against democracy is staggering. Set against what the CIA has done and continues to do to “interfere” in the domestic affairs of other countries — including Russia — the 2016 election was, at most, par for the course for international affairs and, more accurately, a trivial and ordinary act in the context of CIA interference.