In recent years, a security unit meant to protect Commerce Department officials morphed into a force so aggressive that its members rifled through employees’ offices and combed through social media sites for criticism of the census process under the Trump administration, according to the Washington Post.
Almost Gestapo-like.
Almost.
Really good to know we’ll be ready for this in 2030.
There’s a phone booth down the street available to fit all those who didn’t believe that Trump would fascist away when he Came To Power.
What I am saying is that as much as this was horror to us, it is Nirvana to them.
Per this morning’s Washington Post, Lee’s ambitions of creating an Internal Security division at Commerce pre-date the Drumpf administration. He started in 2014.
Just when he started training his subordinates to ask, “Papers, please,” wasn’t clear to me from that article.
Color me not shocked.
Wilbur Ross was never really sleeping, just scheming quietly.
Look who resembles snowflakes now.
Is there any corner of the Executive branch that Trump and his cronies did not trash? (This is a rhetorical question, btw…)
Nope. Stasi is much more like it.
Totally normal stuff here in the land of the free and supported by the people who scream “liberty” and “the Constitution” at every opportunity.
Yep. The jackboots and whips were ordered but didn’t arrive on time.
All joking aside, it is absolutely appalling to read about this stuff and think how close we got to a “Fourth Reich” sort of situation. And until FatAss is dead or so humiliated that all but the most rabid of his supporters at least back off a bit, we are not out of danger. It’s terrifying how strong this insanity continues to be.
Relative handful of votes in the right places and we’d be in a world of shit right now.
Thank Dog that Hillary was on the case and swapping votes out under the radar.
This isn’t the last of this kind of thing that we will hear about during the Trump administration, but it’s really the first one I’ve heard where they were investigating government employees for “loyalty”. I suspect this kind of thing happened in many more places, where demands for worshipping Trump were pushed on civil servants, who probably had to keep their heads down. This kind of thing is probably also why Trump started to make moves to create a new class of civil servants that would allow him and his minions to reclassify and fire anyone they wanted.
Put it all together, and we came way too close to having the government turn from professional bureaucrats who saw their duty to the nation and Constitution into sycophants who say their duty to serve Trump and his budding dictatorship. It’s just way too close to having the government overturned from the inside…things like this news have to come out, and be far more visible, to make it clear what happened and help people to understand what will happen if Trump or someone like him gets ahold of the presidency again.
Why did Ukraine, in 2014, you know that pesky time frame one of the best Presidents of my lifetime was trying to fend off WWIII, beg Zuckerberg personally to… disable Kremlin bots ?
A group of Ukrainians has had enough of what they say is politically-motivated blocking of prominent Facebook users. Several well-known pro-Ukrainian activists who are critical of the Kremlin and the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine have had their Facebook pages blocked in recent weeks. Users believe the pages, which in no way violate Facebook’s terms of service, were blocked due to an unusual amount of complaints filed by what they call “organized pro-Putin groups of Russian users.” The Ukrainians, incensed at these attempts to shut them up, have composed a letter addressed directly to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The letter has been circulated on the social network, and has been shared over 900 times during the past 24 hours.
Pro-Ukrainian activists with legitimate pages were blocked by what the accusers say were pro-Putin groups.
From the Guardian:
Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.
And what of Zuckerberg’s friendship?
The pair (Milner and Zuckerberg) became friends and Zuckerberg attended Milner’s wedding in California late in 2011. The ceremony was held at a vast mansion atop a hillside near Silicon Valley that Milner had recently bought for $100m. Milner and Zuckerberg are advisers to each other’s philanthropic ventures and remain close
Now for the bullseye:
Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.
Milner’s firm has invested over $7 billion, with a “B” dollars in tech firms like Airbnb, Spotify, and Alibaba.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement to CNN that Facebook’s relationship with Mail.Ru deserved further scrutiny.
“In the last 6 months we’ve learned that Facebook had few controls in place to control the collection and use of user data by third parties. Now we learn that the largest technology company in Russia, whose executives boast close ties to Vladimir Putin, had potentially hundreds of apps integrated with Facebook, collecting user data. If this is accurate, we need to determine what user information was shared with mail.ru and what may have been done with the captured data,” Warner said.
And later in article:
Russian investor Yuri Milner was the chairman of Mail.Ru Group until he stepped down in 2012. Milner told Forbes he served as a member of then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s innovation commission from 2009 to 2011.
we’re still that close. If we don’t fix things ASAP we’re just going to get there a couple years later then those folks planned.
OK the problem is that George Lee was in Commerce before Trump. Lee is an idiot, and was an idiot before Trump. The pattern of surveilling Commerce employees started before Lee.
It seems that ITMS was some unit developed with no purpose or reason to exist. Add in a totally unqualified leader and Boom!, here we are.
“Investigators would reportedly disguise themselves in face masks and, armed with lock-picking kits, conduct such actions as breaking into a worker’s cabinet. The training for investigators entailed trailing ITMS supervisor George Lee as he wildly swerved through roads in the Shenandoah Mountains — supposedly part of a program to teach the newcomers surveillance skills.”
Let a thousand G. Gordon Liddys bloom!
The administration went to court, filled the top level of the Bureau with political appointees and made extreme changes to census operations, all in service of that goal. But ultimately, Trump failed due to a combination of unrealistic time constraints, incompetence and the heightened complications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So I guess we’re lucky? Doesn’t feel that way.
The integrity of the 2020 Census must be held in doubt.
Somebody I know (ahem) was a Census field worker and was unimpressed, st say the least. The premature closing of field work must be investigated by Congress and unexpected over- and under-counts examined.
Well, we know now what they’re going to do the next time, but a whole lot bigger.
This crap is a map.
And there may be patterns of layoffs and firings that could be revealing of larger issues…