The Sunday Mail lifted the lid–a bit–on how the COVID “emergency” prompted the government to expand domestic surveillance on politicians, journalists, and ordinary UK citizens–using their military psyops Brigade.

In effect, the program was a military operation targeting domestic dissidents, although from what we know the military component was using surveillance technology, while whatever active measures were taken to manipulate information were taken through other channels. Most of those measures remain shrouded in mystery.

A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Military operatives in the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.

They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.

Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

The tale is troubling–for obvious reasons–and made even more so by the revelation that there was little pretense about rooting out foreign cyber operations. It was straight up targeting domestic skeptics of government COVID policies. In the US, the intelligence community concocted take tales of foreign-directed cells to justify their efforts to monitor and censor Americans, accusing average Americans of being Russian bots. The blossoming “Hamilton 68″scandal is clearly part of this effort, in which a 3rd party cutout was used by the intelligence community to justify silencing dissent.

In the UK the excuse was Chinese cyber operations. However, the 77th Brigade (psyops) didn’t actually target Chinese-linked propaganda, but dissenting politicians and journalists. Anybody who questioned government policy was monitored, and the surveillance was forwarded to the Prime Minister’s office for further action.

The revelations come via a UK civil liberties watchdog called “Big Brother Watch.” They used whistleblower accounts and government transparency laws to cobble together the information. Their key findings were:

Key Findings:

• Anti-fake news units in the Cabinet Office and DCMS spent much of their time monitoring social media for political dissent, under the guise of “counter-disinformation” work.
• Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Conservative MPs David Davis & Chris Green, journalists including Peter Hitchens and Julia Hartley-Brewer, and academics from the University of Oxford and University College London all had comments critical of the government recorded by the anti-fake news units.
• Soldiers from the Army’s 77th Brigade collated tweets from British citizens about Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic and passed them to the Cabinet Office. Troops also conducted “sentiment analysis” about the government’s Covid-19 response.
• The Rapid Response Unit [Cabinet Office] pressured a Whitehall department to attack newspapers for publishing articles analysing Covid-19 modelling that it feared would “affect compliance” with pandemic restrictions.
• RRU staff featured Conservative MPs, activists and journalists in “vaccine hesitancy reports” for opposing vaccine passports.
• The Counter Disinformation Unit [DCMS] has a special relationship with social media companies it uses to recommend content be removed. Third party contractors trawled Twitter for perceived terms of service violations and passed them to CDU officials.
• Front organisations aimed at minority communities were set up by the Research, Communications and Intelligence Unit [Home Office] to spread government propaganda in the UK.

The British government’s programs largely mirror what happened in the U.S., in the sense that the government used an extensive range of tools to spread a unified narrative and to strangle not only misinformation, but all forms of dissent. And as with the United States, the efforts were not aimed at suppressing foreign disinformation operations per se, but the quash dissent in all its forms.

Dissent from whomever. Notice that both Labor and Conservative politicians were targeted, as were academics and journalists. There isn’t even a pretense of foreign interference.

There is nothing shocking in itself to discover that the government would be interested in public sentiment–that is standard for all actors in politics and business in the modern world.

Nor are hardball messaging strategies surprising. What do you think all those press secretaries and PIOs are for in government? To put out a narrative favorable to the government. Karine Jean-Pierre and her ilk exist to propagate a narrative, true or (usually) false. In many cases these people are simply doing a job where they disseminate information, but spun in a way favorable to the government. Americans are prepared to be skeptical consumers of this kind of spin.

What is shocking is both the extent of those operations–bordering on domestic spying–and tying together the data collected to actions to suppress dissent. As we know, social media, websites, and video sites like YouTube buckled under government pressure to suppress dissenting information. We have yet another example with YouTube suppressing the Project Veritas Pfizer investigation in the past day.

BREAKING: @JamesOKeefeiii gives update on YouTube Removing Critical Mass #DirectedEvolution Video pic.twitter.com/R0Xog7zwmx

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 28, 2023

These companies, contrary to the false narrative still being disseminated, were not simply acting based upon their own prejudices. In many cases, at least early on, the executives at these companies believed that the accusations against people were false, and the censorship requests were illegitimate. Over time they got on board with the project, sometimes enthusiastically, but at the very least their actions were simply buckling under both public and private pressure.

If you look at the timeline this is obvious. Government officials, both in the executive and legislative branches of government in the United States, threatened media companies repeatedly with regulatory crackdowns and even anti-trust investigations if they didn’t suppress “disinformation.” The intent was clear: do the government’s bidding.

It worked. The same is true throughout Europe and in the UK, where government has been passing laws requiring the suppression of dissenting opinion that is dressed up as “disinformation,” being defined as contrary to government narratives. The EU already has such laws in place and openly threaten shutting down social media companies for not complying with demands for censorship.

How do we know that it is narrative enforcement rather than simply a misguided attempt to ensure that vital information on a security-related subject isn’t being manipulated? Simply look at the fact that what is and is not allowed to be published or propagated on social media has changed over time. If government messaging changes, censorship rules change. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal is merely one of many examples. Russian disinformation that must be banned turned out to be true and OK to discuss, simply based upon the whims of the government.

Even huge MSM companies will willingly spread false or misleading information, as when they “debunked” the Hunter Biden laptop story despite everybody knowing it was true. The FBI itself had verified its integrity and yet lied to everybody about it.

The bottom line is clear: government is conducting information warfare against dissenters. This is not different in any substantial way from what the intelligence community and psychological operations officers do when we are conducting hot or cold wars against adversaries. Shape the information landscape by amplifying certain voices and suppressing others in order to achieve a favorable set of beliefs in the population.

This is not benign, or normal political propaganda. To a certain extent everybody engages in propaganda, amplifying messages favorable to oneself or the outcome that is desired. This is far more. It is using all the tools the government has, both civilian and military, to control the narrative citizens hear.

Directing the military to surveil dissenters would be considered beyond the pale in a liberal society; it was only justified based upon there being an “emergency.” In the United States that formal state of emergency continues to this day–it was just extended, in fact, by the Biden Administration.

The UK has an “unwritten” constitution, largely based upon common law and practice. Given how unprecedented these activities are what has been done clearly violates the spirit of that constitution, but there is no clear letter of the law of which I am aware, unless something was passed in parliament of which I am unaware (quite possible).

What has been done in the US is almost certainly unconstitutional in both the spirit and the letter of the law, although the final judge of that is the courts. It may take years to untangle everything, and in most cases it will be too late. Things get buried, lines get blurred.

The bottom line is that over the past few decades the Western world is becoming Sinocized. The Chinese surveillance state and the accompanying social credit system is too attractive to reject for anybody in power. Life is easier by far when criticism is suppressed and dissent is punished.

Worse, at least in the United States, much of our intelligence apparatus is nominally private. Contractors do the work rather than government employees, likely affording them greater latitude of action. The post-9/11 landscape is so radically different from what came before that it’s difficult to compare them.

Currently the vast majority of our intelligence is conducted through private companies funded by the government to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Nearly a million people engage in these activities with limited oversight, and that is as the government likes it.

It’s opacity is justified by the necessity of maintaining physical security against foreign attacks. Since 9/11, it’s been obvious that there are legitimate concerns. But given what we know so far about the information warfare being conducted  against US dissidents, we must wonder how much of that money and manpower is directed within.

I was naïve enough to believe–back in 2002-2005–that the vast majority of this activity was justified by the threat. I had no illusions that the power would not be abused occasionally, because people are people. Any power will be abused, and we need to watch the watchdogs.

But we are well beyond the normal corruption of power; we have entered the realm of these organizations existing to prop up the government, not protect the citizenry.

This is what happens in banana republics, where the army exists mainly to police the citizenry, not protect the country. Here it is the information army, because that suffices for the powers-that-be, and peaceful and compliant societies are wealthier and more powerful. Covert control is superior to overt.

But the intent is the same. Control.

We may not be quite as far down the path as China, but we are marching in the same direction. The FBI is corrupt, at least at the top. Our intelligence agencies are corrupt–during the Obama Administration not one but two officials committed perjury before Congress and remain not only free and unpunished, but actually are making bank in the private sector and still conducting information operations against Americans on national TV.

What else can you call it when former intelligence officials create organizations that exist solely to discredit true information and dissenting opinions? And that is what Hamilton 68 existed to do. It should be the greatest government scandal of our generation, simply due to scale. But it is ignored by the MSM.

Is freedom doomed, or can we circumscribe the power? I don’t know for sure.

I fear America is slipping away, as eventually it must if history is any guide. But America is also resilient, as much due to the vibrancy of our economy as with anything else. Every time a new industry pops up the government is caught flat-footed and new power structures develop. That happened with the internet, initially to good effect. As the government adapted they have coopted the industry to do their bidding, but the initial burst of freedom shows that it can happen.

And, of course, each of us gets a say, at least to some extent. America is not yet China, and won’t be for some time. They have hard despotism, while in America and the West it is still soft despotism.

We still have some freedom, at least until we become the focus of the Elite’s ire. It’s incumbent upon all of us to do what we can to preserve that freedom.