It took huge courage from the whistleblower, who is a patriot, and a huge amount of work by my team and the Mail on Sunday to publish this important information. I’ll post key passages for you.
“77th Brigade is a hybrid unit of regular and reserve personnel that was established in 2015. It delivers information activities as part of broader military effects against hostile state actors & violent extremist organisations based outside the UK.”
It’s totally understandable why you’d think the revelations are shocking - they are. It doesn’t mean they’re untrue.
I’d be happy to meet and discuss this further, and of course we’ve already invited you to our event in Parliament where this will be discussed in detail…
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Whilst we welcome this probe, and that the Defence Secretary is clearly concerned by the #MinistryOfTruth exposé… he seems to admit the role of 77th Brigade in domestic monitoring?! Which they had *always* denied.
“It uses (…) social media to assess UK disinformation trends”
Today we released a complex investigation - I want to clarify something that some have misunderstood.
The prolific monitoring/reporting of critics was government’s Counter Disinformation Unit in the Culture Department. Attention must be focused there - it needs to be shut down
The 77th Brigade did schoolboy key word Twitter searches & effectively sentiment analysis. They didn’t have clearance to repeatedly view individual accounts & they had very poor resources. Please read the whistleblower’s testimony carefully in our report bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
As it’s quite revealing.
The military deploying resource in a way that will clearly adversely impact our own population, without ANY safeguards to even attempt to limit it, is a scandal.
But the most serious monitoring is actually coming from *policy units* in govnt. It’s wild
Take it from someone who works day in day out to defend free speech *and* privacy - this is dangerous, headline-chasing nonsense from @DominicRaab that will in fact emaciate the greatest constitutional protections for citizens’ liberties in Britain - rights Churchill fought for.
If you’re worried about “cancel culture”, as I am, you’ll be worried about a) Dominic Raab trying to cancel our human rights and b) the Online Safety Bill he presides over, which poses one of the greatest threats to free speech of any law in living memory - a censor’s charter.
His plans are… intellectually challenged, riddled with double speak, and a disaster for our rights. It would be despicable to rip up long fought-for rights due to, at best, incompetence, or at worst, a vanity project that chases empty headlines to advance leadership ambitions.
An unexpected visitor to the Met police deployment of facial recognition today, Commissioner Cressida Dick. And we left her with nothing to say..! #StopFacialRecognition
Transcript:
Me: (..) 95% of the flags are misidentifications
CD: I’m sorry, we’re not going to agree on this
Me: No we won’t because these are the facts
CD: Nobody’s privacy was intruded on was it? (smiles 🥴)
Me: Absolutely it was
CD: In the past 3 hours?
Me: No because it wasn’t working
CD: Exactly (walks off) Exactly, that’s my point (🤯)
SOLIDARITY with Freedom Convoys against vaccine mandates, against the wave of anti-working class authoritarianism, from Canada to France to New Zealand ✌️
“Fears it may affect the Super Bowl” 🤪 you can’t make this stuff up… give your head a wobble @Newsweek
Workers whose value was appreciated more than ever during the pandemic - such as health care workers & HGV drivers - are being so quickly devalued again for refusing to submit their bodies, values or autonomy to bosses & rulers; and now persecuted for taking collective action.
The end of Covid passes in England is a MONUMENTAL victory for civil liberties & equality 🎉
What separates us from much of the covid-ID-managed West is the principled courage of every Brit who stood up when it mattered, against the odds, & our uniquely strong civil society 👊
Not many countries have had active + impactful civil liberties organisations during the pandemic, & it shows.
Here’s a run down of just *some* of the work we’ve done, thanks to incredible public support, to push back on covid IDs over the past 20 months!
We’re now pursuing a legal challenge against Covid passes in Wales - a scheme opposed by @WelshConserv & @WelshLibDems too. The case for Covid ID simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
No wonder Welsh ministers won’t let us publish our claim - it’s extremely embarrassing for them.