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| A case considered by the US Supreme Court could have important ramifications for the trademark law and the way it can be limited by First Amendment provisions.
We explore this today.
Become a supporter here to get this post and the complete Reclaim The Net archive. |  | Watch the video here.If you use the terms "red-pilled," "based," "looksmaxxing," and even names like "Chad" and "Stacey," you may just be a violent extremist.
At least, that's according to the FBI.
It turns out, the FBI has a secret list of flagged terms that it uses internally to possibly indicate an individual's involvement in "violent extremism,"
This was revealed in documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project.
It's not just specific phrases that the FBI is watching out for, but also certain words like "cel," which is short for "incel" or "involuntary celibate."
According to the FBI, this online community of men believes that they can't attract women, and as a result, they're involuntarily celibate. The FBI's glossary of words also indicates "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism" and a list of "key terms" about "involuntary celibate violent extremism."
The Oversight Project has tweeted about the FBI's documents, expressing concern about how the FBI equates protected online speech to violence. |  | According to the FBI, using common online terms like "based" or "redpilled" are signs of "Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism."
Here are some highlights of the common internet terms the FBI thinks could be a sign of extremism.
"Red pilled" is an idea taken from the popular Matrix movies refers to someone taking a path of truth. But, according to the FBI, it could indicate someone who has racist, or fascist beliefs.
The FBI thinks the term "Chad" is a "Race-specific term used to describe an idealized version of a male, who is very successful at gaining sexual and romantic attention from women."
A "Stacy" is an "Idealized version of a female, who is very successful at gaining sexual and romantic attention from men." A Stacy chooses Chad over Incels, the FBI notes.
Defined by the FBI as the "process of self-improvement with the intent to become more attractive," "Looksmaxxing" is apparently another sign of extremism.
Using the term "Based" - often used to describe an option that is grounded, and not "woke," could be a sign that a person has a "racist ideology," the FBI believes.
This isn't the first time a government agency has monitored common language to be a sign of extremism.
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security justified watching online speech by classifying dissenting opinions as "misinformation," and therefore a possible terror threat.
A 2022 bulletin warned about the, "proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in US government institutions."
The DHS further stated that there was a, "online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis-, dis- and mal-information introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors."
Last year, a whistleblower leaked a document to Project Veritas showing that the FBI was focusing on election misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. The document lists what the agency should categorize as "election crimes."
Among the election crimes highlighted in the documents is "misinformation." The document defines misinformation as "false or misleading information spread mistakenly or unintentionally."
Disinformation is also an apparent election "crime," and is defined as "false or inaccurate information intended to mislead others."
The FBI says its glossary of terms is not a definitive list of indicators of violent extremism, but rather, it says, a tool to help identify potential threats.
But many of the terms on the FBI's watchlist can be, and more commonly are, used in a non-extremist context and for popular memes.
The FBI has increasingly been accused of overreach with its monitoring and policing of constitutionally speech.
These latest findings suggest it has no intention of slowing down. | Reclaim The Net is independent and is funded by the community. If you support free speech, the eradication of cancel culture, and restoring privacy and civil liberties, please become a supporter here.
|  | The benevolently named Public Good Projects (PGP) describes itself as a public health nonprofit with focus on "large-scale media monitoring programs, social and behavior change interventions."
A new report is now shedding more light of how the system of censorship and deplatforming of Covid vaccine skeptics worked at the height of the pandemic, including the intricate ties between a number of actors, such as the PGP, and their partners.
One of them is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) non-profit called the CDC Foundation (the CDC itself was established by Congress). Other partners include FDA, Kaiser Permanente, Rockefeller, and Humana, as per the Tennessee Department of Health, which cites these as part of the bio of the PGP CEO, Dr. Joe Smyser.
And the Public Goods Project in the past received funding not from lobbyists for just any corporate players but those strongly interested in stomping out any vaccine hesitancy - namely, vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer and Moderna.
To add another "ingredient" into this "dish" that will appear unsavory to many, the New York City's Health Department Misinformation Response Unit was also among those the PGP has in its portfolio of collaborations.
But things get more granular from there. The PGP operates an initiative called Shots Heard, while another one with a similar mission is called Team Halo and is the brainchild of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project.
An Epoch Times report details how in 2021, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor who graduated from Stanford, was one of those caught in their crosshairs online.
Bowden's "crime" was posting content on Twitter and TikTok skeptical of the vaccine, and at the same time positive of the use of ivermectin in Covid treatment.
This drew the attention and the ire of influencers on these platforms and YouTube, themselves doctors - such as Zachary Rubin and Christina Kim, members of Team Halo.
Rubin was called "problematic" in their posts, and they asked for her license to be revoked.
Only days after, in November 2021, Bowden learned from a Houston Chronicle journalist, rather than from the hospital itself, that she was getting suspended from Houston Methodist.
"Over the following months, Bowden's life was thrown into chaos as multiple social media influencers targeted her. However, the most dogged was a pharmacist named Savannah, who posts under the handle @rxOrcist," the article continued.
And "Savannah" - who is a member of Shots Heard - and posts to over a million followers, even managed to accuse Bowden of "xenophobia and racism" because she was talking about anti-ivermectin pharmacists, many of whom happened to be Asian.
The result was TikTok banning Bowden, YouTube suspending her, while suspected fake patients left negative reviews which the doctor is unable to get deleted. And there were even incidents in her office where security had to get involved. | The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that new medical codes for COVID-19 vaccination status are used to track users. The agency confirmed the use of the codes to track people in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by The Epoch Times.
The new International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, which were introduced in April 2022, are aimed at tracking people who are partially vaccinated and those who are not vaccinated. The CDC, which introduced the codes, says it does not track people but that health care systems do track people.
View the released documents here. |  | | "The ICD codes were implemented in April 2022, however the CDC does not have any data on the codes and does not track this information," the agency wrote in an email.
It added that the codes' purpose is "to enable healthcare providers to track within their practices."
When the codes were first proposed in 2021, CDC medical officer Dr. David Berglund said: "There has been interest expressed in being able to track people who are not immunized or who are only partially immunized."
Healthcare providers supported the proposal and even made submissions on how the codes would be used.
In a joint letter to the CDC, senior vice president of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Danielle Lloyd, and senior vice president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, said that the codes "will help health insurance providers identify emollees [sic] who may benefit from outreach and further education about vaccination."
"Creating ICD-10 codes that can be tracked via claims would provide health insurance providers key information to help increase immunization rates," they added.
Executive director at The Permanente Federation LLC Erica Eastham and director of Kaiser Permanente Health Plan and Hospitals Nancy Andersen went as far as suggesting the creation of code indicating the reason someone is under-vaccinated or unvaccinated, with reasons including "belief or group pressure" or a contraindication.
| MONITORING PHONE USEAGE PATTERNS |  | Telesign, the company that's had a big role in two-factor identification (2FA) is now looking to move to developing accurate global digital identity solutions using "AI."
Telesign CEO Joe Burton revealed that he believes it can be powered by what a report refers to as "fuzzy AI" - at the intersection of "AI" and statistical analysis.
Speaking for TechRepublic, Burton appears to suggest that this is meant to carve up a more sizable market share for Telesign, which, despite its 2FA claim to fame, makes incomparably less money from that tech than the likes of OpenID, LastPass, etc.
Now, Telesign is turning to "AI" as a way to make itself competitive, primarily via the Communications Platform-as-a-Service, which has been in the works for four years now.
And the key to this is to get rid of passports and use people's phone numbers for both ID verification, and data modeling, as well as "customized communications."
When referencing "AI," Burton, like so many before him, is actually speaking about machine learning (ML), and has among other things told the publication about the ways Telesign wants to use it to analyze locations and network activity of billions of unique phone numbers.
He provided some concrete numbers: 5 billion numbers in 195 countries going through the data company's system each month, and this is visible to Telesign "on behalf" of 3,000 businesses.
"We are looking at 2,200 different attributes on your phone usage patterns, and are using all of that to train a machine-learning model that is extraordinarily fast and accurate," Burton said, adding that the goal is to be able to ascertain whether the phone number somebody is using is actually theirs.
And the system based on global intelligence is accurate enough to show if a person creating an account somewhere on the internet is the person they say they are, he added.
The question of how much personal data needs to be retained by the company in order to achieve all this naturally arises next. To this, Burton responded by saying that there is not "a huge" amount of data pertaining to any one individual.
"Instead, when we send a notification to a phone number, perhaps every time I see this phone number it has changed locations, perhaps the user is roaming on the Vodaphone network around the world. I feed that into the AI and create a new statistical model based on a movement event on this phone number in Europe," Burton said.
And according to him, this data is then discarded - but Telesign is left with an "interesting" statistical model.
As for why "AI" is even necessary to fulfill the task instead of using statistical analysis only, Burton said:
"There are many different AI's, if you will. For example, we are involving logarithmic regressions: fancy statistical analysis with a little AI 'fuzziness' around the edges." |  | | As opponents of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are getting more vocal in their criticism of this type of digital version of paper money that many countries are either adopting or are close to doing so. This is one of the pillars of financial globalism, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has made its stance very clear.
The IMF's Spring Meetings this year saw the announcement of the organization's own, "international central bank digital currency" called the Universal Monetary Unit (UMU, aka Unicoin).
The IMF said in a statement that UMU functions like a CBDC and is a legal and global money commodity. The purpose of this particular iteration of a CBDCs is to make sure banking regulations are enforced, as well as to protect "the financial integrity of the international banking system."
This currency will be used by banks via SWIFT codes and bank accounts linked to a UMU digital wallet.
The scheme is supposed to allow for digital cross-border payments modeled after SWIFT, and promises best wholesale exchange rates of settlement currencies and real-time settlement, "while bypassing the correspondent banking system."
At the same time, IMF officials are describing the current cross-border payment system as slow, expensive, and risky, while declaring that UMU's goal is not disruption of the international monetary system - such as it is - but rather, to further "strengthen" it.
Not only that, but the IMF looks set on rebranding the term "crypto" - normally associated with decentralized digital currencies that leave central banks and governments out of the equation. "Crypto 2.0" is how the IMF would market UMU, and likely, CBCDs in general.
Meanwhile, critics of CBDCs are using strong words to express their opposition to the trend, with some calling it a path toward financial slavery that is always a handy companion to political tyranny.
More criticism has to do with CBDCs being seen as a way of introducing social credit scores and digital IDs, thus having individuals fully ceding to the government control over their own assets and/or the amount they spend.
Unlike cash and decentralized crypto, CBCDs are feared to spell the end of private financial affairs, and usher in even more surveillance by the authorities.
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