Facebook pulled down your post. Here's how to challenge that decision

A new board will review some of Facebook's and Instagram's toughest content moderation decisions.

Some Facebook and Instagram users will have the option to appeal to a new board to get their content restored.

Angela Lang/CNET

Facebook and its photo service Instagram are rolling out a new way for you to lodge a challenge if you think your content has been wrongly pulled down.

The social networks remove millions of posts, photos and videos every quarter for violating their rules against nudity, hate speech and other types of offensive content. If you're affected, you can ask Facebook and Instagram to review the decision, but that doesn't guarantee a reversal.Now you have another option. Starting Thursday, you can ask a new oversight board to take another look at your case. If the board rules in your favor, the content will be restored. In the coming months, users will also be able to appeal to the board about content they think should have been removed. The board is made up of 20 experts and civic leaders, including the former prime minister of Denmark, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, law professors and journalists.

"The oversight board wasn't created to be a quick fire or an all-encompassing solution, but to offer a critical independent check on Facebook's approach to moderating some of the most significant content issues," Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former prime minister of Denmark, who co-chairs the oversight board, said in a press conference Thursday.

Facebook and Instagram users will see a reference ID number if their post is eligible for review by the oversight board.

Facebook

Here's how it works: After a final removal decision is made, you could receive a message in your support inbox within the Facebook or Instagram app that includes an oversight board reference ID. If you receive this ID, your post is eligible for review by the board. You'll have 15 days to submit an appeal.

To do so, you'll need to visit the oversight board's website and click "Start Submission" located in bottom of the Appeals Process section. You'll be asked to log in to your Facebook or Instagram account, depending on where you posted the content. After entering your reference ID and consenting to how your information could be used, you'll answer questions about why you posted, why you're appealing and why you think the decision was wrong. After submitting your case to the board, you can track updates. If your case is chosen for review, the oversight board will issue a public explanation on its ruling. (Users can ask the board not to share personally identifiable information about them.)

Only some Facebook and Instagram content will be eligible for review by the oversight board. For example, the board won't be reviewing ads or direct messages. The board also won't be taking another look at child exploitation images, because reinstating the photos could be illegal. The changes are being rolled out over time, because Facebook wants to ensure the products for the board and users are stable. That means you may have to wait before this option's available to you.

The oversight board is prioritizing cases it thinks could affect a large number of users, are important to public discourse or that raise key questions about Facebook's policies.

Facebook's sites have billions of monthly active users globally and a staggering volume of content, so you'll probably have a tough time getting the board to review your case. The board can also consider cases referred by Facebook and will have to weigh whether they're significant, globally relevant and could impact the social network's future policy. The board is prioritizing cases it thinks could affect a large number of users, are important to public discourse or that raise key questions about Facebook's policies.

"I don't think there's any question that -- even though [the board] will take only a handful of cases in the beginning -- that those cases have the power and potential to be spectacularly influential into the world," Brent Harris, who oversees governance at Facebook, said in an interview.

To help the board review submitted cases, Facebook built a tool that lets the board track what's submitted and sort the cases based on topics. The board will see how many times a piece of content has been reported, as well as other information about the case. 

It could also take some time before the board decides on a case. It has up to 90 days to uphold or overturn a removal decision. Facebook can submit a case to the board for expedited review, which could take up to 30 days.

Thorning-Schmidt said during the call that Facebook has been criticized for "moving fast and breaking things" but that the board wants to be the opposite of that and look at long-term issues. 

Facebook's decisions to leave up or pull down content have sparked more scrutiny ahead of the US presidential election. Civil rights activists and lawmakers have criticized the company for not doing enough to remove hate speech. At the same time, Republicans say Facebook is suppressing their content to sway the outcome of the election -- allegations the company repeatedly denies.

Facebook grappled with more political pressure after it limited the reach of a New York Post article about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's son, as it was being fact-checked. That reignited concerns about anti-conservative bias, and Senate Republicans called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, to testify about the issue. 

Harris said the company could ask the board to issue a policy advisory opinion related to how the social network handled the New York Post article. Facebook is just starting the process of referring cases to the board and didn't have any more details about what cases the company is thinking about submitting for review.

"The scope for this board is broad and has been built to really address a wide array of difficult content decisions," Harris said. 

When Fear Rules

 

When our 74-year-old president was released from Walter Reed Medical Center on Monday night, he made this commonsense declaration about COVID-19: “Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge.”

After President Trump triumphantly removed his mask upon his return to the White House, the mainstream media raged.  CNN, which always serves as a bellwether for the MSM’s reaction to anything, led with this drivel:

(CNN) - President Donald Trump staged a reckless departure from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, telling his followers the virus that dangerously deprived him of oxygen and hospitalized him for 72 hours was nothing to fear before posing for a mask-less photo-op on the White House balcony.       

We know now that demeaning confidence and courage is fashionable among hacks -- two more American virtues to be ground under in a transformed America.  Of greater urgency, the November elections loom, so displays of courage are precisely what Democrats and their media enablers fear.  For courage in just one man can spread, serving as a remedy to fear in many others.  Voters who aren’t scared into masks aren’t as likely to vote for Democrats. 

Contrasting the president, Joe Biden wears a mask almost always -- well, when he’s on camera.  We suspect if cameras were present, addled old Joe would sport a waterproof version in the shower.  Be on the lookout for that pre-election stunt.

Democrats champion masks because masks acknowledge the rule of fear.  They’re symbols of subordination and surrender -- yes, subordination to fear of a germ, and surrender of rights and freedoms.  In this scheme, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be scrapped in favor of contentment with security -- however illusory -- under the watchful eye and guiding hand of corporatist big government, which, of course, is to be led by the cabal that Biden fronts.      

You see, fear is a means.  It’s a weapon in the hands of Democrats.  The mainstream media are eager henchmen.  Power lust drives Democrats to use fear to gain what they covet.  A virus, like a crisis, isn’t to be wasted.  A contagion that helps manufacture a crisis is too tempting to pass up.  Exacerbating fears, and full-on exploitation of whatever may stress the human spirit, are practically trademarked by cynical Democrats.      

Fear has always been an ally to tyrants, whatever the stripe.  How dreary that fact, and how tragic the history of the last century, in particular.  Red terrors, pogroms, Kristallnacht, and Cultural Revolutions are the dramatic manifestations of weaponized fear.  But there are more mundane applications of fear.  With learning, experience, and advancements, tyrants are honing the means. 

Tyranny is showing a blander face nowadays.  Stalin’s stern look and Hitler’s glowering expression have given way to the corporate cool of Xi Jingping or the facelessness of U.S. corporate, sports, and education leaders who operate in a loose confederacy to impose “progressive” orthodoxy.  Or via the checked-out expression of the Democrats propped up standard-bearer.      

Submit and behave well, admonish today’s autocrats, or you won’t have a job, your reputation will be trashed, and your kids won’t have a future.  Sound familiar?  What other is cancel culture, now being practiced on these shores?  A kid with a MAGA cap, Nick Sandmann, can attest to news outlets eagerness to destroy his future.  How many Americans do their jobs in silence, dreading that one remark, one act of independence, can cost them their incomes? 

Cancel culture is no more than a stop on the road to a greater smothering of rights and liberty.  China’s evolving social credit system points the direction, where miscreants -- conspicuously, Hong Kong political dissidents and Falun Gong -- can be shunted to society’s margins.  Still, all Chinese daily live cowed. 

Reported Reuters in March 2018: “President’s Xi Jinping’s plan to construct a social credit system [is] based on the principle of ‘once untrustworthy, always restricted[.]’”   

In China, though, there’s still recourse to the old ways for the hardest cases.  The Epoch Times reported recently on the torture deaths of Falun Gong at Masanjia Labor Camp and Benxi Prison.  Uyghurs, who are Muslims, are dispensed with en masse, condemned to concentration camps and forced labor.       

With cancel culture active here, why would we believe that Xi’s subtler ways are too great a leap for the gray conglomerate and the left that wants to run our lives?  The technology exists and is being upgraded to move to the next phase of supremacy over us.

F.H. Buckley wrote about the prospect of a social credit system in America.  The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2019:

When you see your opponents as evil, such practices begin to look like fair game. Progressives today seem to lack the instinct to question their own judgment and have shed any skepticism about ideology. Given the left’s vicious self-righteousness, on display daily in the media, the question becomes whether it will accept any limits in its quest to impose its views on everyone -- especially if it gains control of the government’s coercive interests.

What do we know about tyrants?  We know that their appetites for power, for control over others, is never satisfied.  They’re the next world’s hungry ghosts. 

Antifa and BLM firebrands are identified threats, of course.  They’re provocateurs and herders.  Lawlessness, mayhem, and violence are used to intimidate, to make citizens cower… in time, to drive them to seek refuge.  How much are folk, frightened and wearied by disorder, willing to trade for order?  History says much, if people are pushed enough.  Democrats and the left seek a tipping point.    

Knowledge combats fear because it informs courage.  There’s no shortage of facts and data that countervail what’s commonly accepted about COVID: that a viral sword dangles over all our heads.  No such thing is true.  Trump was intrepid, not foolhardy, in his declaration and in stripping off his mask.  His was an act of defiance in the teeth of a formidable array of enemies… a challenge to the groupthink that promotes anxiety.  A critical aspect of leadership is daring defiance, when necessary. 

Defiance serves as a rallying cry.  The flag is planted.  The fight is here, now.  Think of colonists who signed the Declaration of Independence.  Imagine defying the most powerful empire on the planet, the mighty rulers of the American colonies?  Failure would have led these men to the gallows.  Yet, they acted.  It’s said that courage is best defined as action in the face of fear.  Fortune favors the courageous.    

Our history isn’t of a people buckling to fear -- not for very long, anyway.  We’ve been an intrepid people, willing to challenge our limits, willing to risk.  Our rewards have been great as a result.  Courage is requisite to freedom.    

A class has risen among us, full of conceits and impulses to dominate.  They want to take our freedom from us.  To do so, these toxic souls are manipulating us to live in fear.  If we fail to act with courage, we’ll surely lose our liberty.  If we act courageously, we’ll defeat this growing tyranny.  We’re presented with a stark choice: courage or cowardice.  The consequences of our choice are historic. 

 

J. Robert Smith 

I am Joseph F Barber I am an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. A Freelance syndicated writer ,editor and author activist and Blogger,Tradesmen , US Army Veteran and PTSD survivor, Gas and diesel Mechanic

Don’t Vote for a Psychopath: Tyranny at the Hands of a Psychopathic Government

 

Don’t Vote for a Psychopath: Tyranny at the Hands of a Psychopathic Government

“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation's capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”

But what does this really mean in practical terms?

It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the people” are the ones that call the shots.

Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers.

We are not cogs in the machine.

We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free, and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

The 2020 Election Bamboozle: We Are All Victims of the Deep State’s Con Game

The 2020 Election Bamboozle: We Are All Victims of the Deep State’s Con Game

 “We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche.... As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan

This is not an election.

This is a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle.

In this carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.

We are victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.  

In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Joe Biden—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.

In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.

Terrorist attacks, pandemics, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.

No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.

We just haven’t learned to recognize our prison walls as such.

It’s like that old British television series The Prisoner, which takes place in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in The Village, a beautiful resort with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked. Residents of the Village are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

First broadcast in Great Britain 50-some years ago, The Prisoner dystopian television series —described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role.

In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the Deep State and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic - the hallmark of a healthy and free society - has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter who wins this upcoming presidential election.

And that’s the hustle, you see: because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, the day after a new president is sworn in, we’ll still find ourselves prisoners of the Village.

This should come as no surprise to those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior: we never stopped being prisoners.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never be free.