I’m proud to be the first National Magazine Award winner to be kicked off Twitter at the request of a Nazi
… but perhaps removing our registered non-profit was a bit overboard?
[Email to colleagues and volunteers after our campaign to expose Palantir and deter ICE ends in impressive fascist victory, like most Twitter conflicts]
A day and a half into what had quickly become a vastly popular civil action to highlight top Palantir execs as well as the threatened ICE raids that will now make use of the firm’s advanced data collation methods, my account was successfully suspended after an alt-right Pepe frog “based” character kept posting nonsense and then reported me when I insulted him.
My last suspension, the day after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, came when I told a man repeating the same Soros myth that had been cited by the shooter and possibly the pipe bomb suspect as well that he should “go shave yourself, slut”. Two weeks later, Twitter decided I’d learned my lesson, and was ready to play nicely with the anti-Semite blood libel enthusiast.
Thereafter, the account got Pursuance’s Twitter suspended for supposed dual use (I don’t have access to it; the alt-right account merely reported that I did, and is now trying to do likewise to the Free Barrett Brown account that made my defense possible and has since been used to publicize such things as re-arrest for giving interviews, DOJ subpoenas to my publishers and orders to halt my income, the lawsuits over their targeting of my legal donors, and violent threats over my work that have never quite ceased, and have sometimes come from former police officers here in Dallas via their own accounts).
All of this comes a comes a day after my Facebook account was suspended for 30 days — coincidentally enough, the morning after our anti-ICE/Palantir information operations campaign #OpClaudia was launched to widespread interest among press and citizens alike - and then murdered by thugs like its namesake, the 20-year-old immigrant Claudia Gomez, herself shot to death by border agents who thereafter proceeded to lie about the circumstances.
Years ago, Google removed Project PM’s website from its search results entirely for perhaps two weeks, until we discovered this and it was thereupon remarked upon publicly by a Wired reporter, at which point it suddenly came back up. Now, though, it was no longer the first result for such things as the NSA-linked Endgame Systems, which itself would later appear on my March 2012 FBI search warrant, along with Project PM’s website and Project PM itself — a crowd-sourced research entity dedicated to investigating the obviously crucial new propaganda and surveillance technologies that Palantir is now using to capture children, which they were once content merely to spy upon.
There’s still a video on YouTube from when I had to replace a recorded call to TASC exec John Lovegrove that I’d made while writing my piece on Romas/COIN (which involved Apple, Google, TASC, HBGary Federal — and also Archimedes Global and White Canvas Group, both of which would be involved in still-opaque election activities with Cambridge Analytica/SCL in 2016, while White Canvas was run by friend of Gen. Michael Flynn, as I became aware last week when I looked at it again after all these years); after this important record was removed, much as other of my interviews were back then (some now restored from copies provided elsewhere), I had to put up a new one in which I did Lovegrove’s voice in a series of foppish caricatures (I didn’t actually have to do this, but still)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvS0Jn8r9w
Anyway, this is a stressful time for myself, Claire Peters, Annalise Burkhart, and the large number of volunteers who have come on lately to achieve this thing that Michael Hastings and I once hoped could be used to reform the media, and which I now understand must do so. Those of us working on the project today are only one example of those emergent net-based groupings that have found their work and efforts and resources reduced to nothing by happenstance, avarice, malice, or cold and unceasing policy. It’s a compelling example, I believe, of how fragile anyone’s dreams cans be in an Information Age ruled by an Information Autocracy that is rarely so tangible that we can feel what it might be, and is most fully so when it reaches out to strike.
If you can help to make this incident known, or perhaps even help us to reverse what has happened in these pictures below, please consider doing so.
There is a great deal that needs reforming, it seems, and after all of this complaint and fretfulness, I want to thank everyone for what they’ve done to get us closer to the point where that kind of reform may be easier pursued than it sometimes has been, for us and for those far less fortunate.
I am fond of this picture above, which I had remembered well from the news stories when she was killed, and made a point of using for this operation when I learned of the planned weekend raids. It presents a dignity and poise and virtuous worth that would make it hard for one to shrug off the small duties that we tend to ask of ourselves in these kinds of projects.
But what we must focus on is below.
It is a screenshot created and posted by the soft, post-modern Nazi who only had to push a few buttons to end what hundreds of people had begun to attempt to accomplish. See how he’s highlighted those parties I’d summoned in the course of recruiting for something that many would agree was worth trying out.
Here he has proscribed any number of anarchist and anti-prison movements; Hispanic legal assistance groups; even John Cusack (whom I’d included, incidentally, as he had offered help some time back and will be getting me in touch with the Indian thinker and activist Arundhati Roy, with whom he wrote a book on discussions with Snowden and Ellsberg during a group visit to Moscow — but anyway there is nothing for Roy or Cusack or anyone to choose or decline now). All are proscribed. So, inevitably, is a radical bookstore, Burning Books, where I’d given a talk after my speech at Niagara University some weeks back.
I was satisfied after having compiled this list, not simply because it was a bit of trouble and it was done, but because one can look at such a thing and get a sense of how much can go right, eventually, when that subset of people who seek responsibility for the world around them, and are so focused on that duty that they love nothing more than to find the ways that it might be done better, are given the chance to do so.
Now I look at it, and at the non-profit that so many people have worked to build for free, even at great cost to themselves, from almost the moment I got out of prison over two years ago, because they want to make that some cooperation easier for those coming next, and more fruitful for those it is to benefit. And I look at this list, with names proscribed by a Nazi with a digital pen, and everything wiped out as Twitter carries out its order, and I know that I will never catch this Nazi himself, but I know that it doesn’t matter, because my next plan will cast a wider net, and it will be far crueler.
