Neoliberalism's starting gun went off on 1973, when a US- and UK-backed fascist military deposed Salvador Allende, the incredibly popular, democratically elected president of Chile.
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The coup embodied Peter Thiel's summation of the libertarian principle that "Democracy is incompatible with liberty," where "liberty" means the freedom of the 1% to amass unlimited wealth at the expense of the starving, brutalized 99%.
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The new dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was feted by Anglo-American right wing figures, including the elite of the Chicago School of Economics and their cult leader, Friedrich Hayek, who traveled to Chile to oversee a program of torture and murder as Pinochet consolidated power.
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In 2013, Daniel Rigmaiden - facing life in prison for 35 counts each of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft - was offered a surprise deal by federal prosecutors.
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They knew that he had uncovered an obsessively kept secret: that he had been caught with a surveillance device called a "Stingray" - a fake cellular tower that tricked phones into leaking their owners' identities to its operators.
Stingrays were made by the Harris Corporation, a notorious arms dealer. They came with onerous secrecy requirements that the feds enforced with criminal ruthlessness, like ordering cops to lie on the stand about how they caught their suspects.
Here's the context. Ad Observatory is a tool that helps FB users scrape and store the ads that get shown to them. These ads are pooled by academics in a repository that is used to analyze Facebook's failure to enforce its own policies about paid disinformation campaigns.
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FB has threatened to sue a university for maintaining this tool. They claim that they are required to do this by the FTC and as a means of protecting their users' privacy.