#government-coercion

#government-coercion

In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries - the highest number ever recorded. This reflects a growing trend of governments treating connectivity as a weapon.

Belarus' parliament has approved a bill making 'propaganda of homosexual relations, gender change, refusal to have children, and pedophilia' crimes, with penalties including fines and detention.

The Supreme Court's ruling stated that Memorial and its supporters are 'clearly anti-Russian in nature and are aimed at destroying the basic foundations of Russian statehood, violating its territorial integrity, and eroding historical, cultural, spiritual, and moral values.'

Once upon a time, adding official to an announcement served a purpose. It distinguished fact from rumour, press release from pub chat. Sensible. Helpful. Civilised. But in recent years, the word has gone rogue. Nothing can simply happen anymore. It must be officially announced.

On Feb. 28, Israel vividly demonstrated the potential of such systems to be hacked and used against adversaries when Israel tracked down Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the help of Tehran's own street cameras - despite repeated warnings that Iran's surveillance systems had been compromised.

In the future world, America, with its energy and vitality, must play a leading role,

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

For years, we've been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration's supposed "censorship industrial complex." We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically it. The Supreme Court looked at it and said there was no standing because there was no evidence of coercion.

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It's easy, it's meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government's attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.