In this episode, we speak to Silky Carlo from Big Brother Watch, who reveals the extent of the government's surveillance of dissent and attempts to counter the spread of the Pandemic, a global pandemic that has swept across the globe in recent years. We discuss the role played by the government in counter-distorting public opinion, and how this information is being spread to stifle dissent and stifle freedom of speech. See it first on Rumble, and then on Stay Free with Russell Brand, where you can catch up with the full episode on Rumble here. Stay Free With Russell Brand is a podcast produced by YouWakingWonders.co.uk. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "stackingsats" at checkout to receive 10% off your first pack! To buy a copy of our new book, click here. To support the show, visit bit.ly/OurBooks and support our campaign to make sure you re not just one of the lucky few getting a free copy of the book, head over to the Amazon Prime and Kindle store. We'll be giving you 5% off the final edition of the paperback edition of The Dark Lord edition of our book, available in hardcover and hardcover, priced between $99 and $99.99. We'll also be giving away two hardcover copies of the hardcover edition of OurAdobe and paperback edition, priced at $99, including a colour-only $99 paperback edition costing $99 plus shipping + shipping only $99 retail boxset, plus a limited edition of a hardcover of the second edition of $99). and two hardbound hardcover costing $150.99, plus two audibly proof of the third-edition edition, which includes a colour print, and two audible edition, and audible audible book, which will be available on Blu-CD, priced from Amazon Prime, and a second edition only $2499, and an Audible binding, priced only $49,99 and two Audible Connections, plus shipping will also be available in Kindle, and Audible and VHS, and Blu-PROMO, and all Audible, we'll get an AVAILABLE on the Kindle, Bespoke Soundtrack, too! we'll be shipping you an ebook, and we'll have an AIM, too.
00:00:01.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:04.000Today, we've got an exclusive interview with Silky Carlo from Big Brother Watch.
00:00:09.000If the Twitter files reveal that the American deep state is spying on you, her revelations, exclusive revelations, show us that this is a global problem, that this is a globalist affair.
00:00:29.000What has been revealed about the nature of the British government's editorialising of the narrative around the pandemic and the degree to which they're prepared to intercept and control public communication around initially this subject?
00:00:44.000What we found through a long-term investigation is that the government has set up a number of secretive units that claim to counter disinformation and after struggling to get information about what these units are actually doing what we found is that they are Also monitoring and recording basically dissenting opinions, people criticising the government, and this impacts MPs, journalists, academics and experts, campaigners, who are ending up in central government files with notes about things that they said where they've criticised government policies.
00:01:20.000This was particularly happening during the pandemic, but the indication is from the documents that we've got is that they've been looking at other topics, but it was absolutely rife during the pandemic.
00:01:30.000On this show we've consistently said that the emerging terms misinformation and disinformation which are presented of course as a means to regulate data ensuring that negative conspiratorial whack job woo woo QAnon information doesn't come to dominate the public sphere is a way in which the public narrative can be curated. It
00:01:52.000is, in essence, as you have demonstrated, a means for shutting down dissent, controlling dissenters,
00:01:59.000smearing them when necessary to ensure that only one narrative is available. Furthermore, we've
00:02:05.000regarded the pandemic, whilst to a degree as a unique phenomenon, as more revelatory than anomalous. It
00:02:18.000So whilst at the moment you're focused on the pandemic and how these organisations that claim to be about misinformation are in fact about shutting down dissent are particularly culpable with regards to the pandemic, It's going to be applicable elsewhere.
00:02:35.000What do you think are the most interesting aspects of the revelation?
00:02:39.000Who in particular is being affected and what should our global audience be most concerned about?
00:02:44.000Well, I think that the big picture, as you say, is that what we found definitively is that the words misinformation and disinformation are being used as blank checks, really by the government to extend power over speech and
00:02:58.000over information and what people can see and what people can share, what they can hear, which is
00:03:03.000a concern. And as you say, yes, that happened during the pandemic, but the staff and the
00:03:10.000resources are now being applied to other things. So the information environment is more controlled.
00:03:17.000In terms of specifically what we've found they've done, to give you an example, David Davis,
00:03:23.000the MP who is a well-known civil libertarian.
00:03:27.000So he's like a Republican, if this was American politics, conservative for a UK audience, and quite a significant political figure, ran for leadership like 10 years ago.
00:03:54.000And yet his name and some of his media comments and social media posts about the issue are found in these counter misinformation files.
00:04:05.000Nothing that he said wasn't Accurate and wasn't true.
00:04:09.000And separately, we actually had a video that we put on our Big Brother Watches YouTube channel of David Davis giving a speech about vaccine passports removed.
00:04:19.000Of course, we kicked up a fuss about it and it was reinstated, but it now makes us think, you know, We know there are censors in government, we know there are censors on the social media companies, less so on Rumble, so what is the connection between the two?
00:04:35.000ultimately that's what these units are doing. They're not just keeping these records for fun.
00:04:38.000Firstly, they're doing it because they want to craft their own messaging and target their own
00:04:44.000messaging towards things that are unflattering and to basically be able to counter some of the
00:04:52.000criticism they're getting. But the other thing is to flag stuff to social media companies for
00:04:59.000them to take down. We've even got ministers saying in Parliament that that's what these units are
00:05:04.000doing. They say daily we tell the social media companies what to take down and we are helping
00:05:10.000them to find misinformation. But until now everyone thought, everyone just created in
00:05:15.000their heads because of this vacuum of information.
00:05:18.000It must be the coordinated Russian disinformation.
00:05:23.000No, it's the politicians you're electing.
00:05:25.000It's the experts in your universities.
00:05:27.000It's the campaigners who are trying to protect your human rights.
00:05:30.000These are the people that are ending up in government files.
00:05:33.000So they're using ideas around Russian disinformation and manipulation of the public space to further facilitate censorship.
00:05:43.000It interests me that political figures that one would once have assumed were part of the establishment, certainly an elected politician, is subject to censorship.
00:05:54.000This shows you that there is, firstly it demonstrates, one of the things we've been talking about on this show,
00:05:59.000that the terms left and right are becoming somewhat redundant
00:06:02.000because the idea of personal individual freedom should be a political absolute,
00:06:08.000whether you're on the left or the right or wherever you exist.
00:06:11.000It also shows you that there appears to be an agenda, certainly people are being censored,
00:06:15.000information is being controlled presumably in pursuit of an objective,
00:06:19.000that is so particular and bespoke that even presumed members of the government are outside of
00:06:41.000Well, can I counter one of the things you said, that there's not a distinction between left and right?
00:06:47.000I think there is an important distinction between left and right.
00:06:49.000Big Brother Watch is non-partisan, but I did see some right-wing narratives come into what would typically be left-wing campaigns during the pandemic.
00:07:01.000My concern is that some extreme points of views that you might associate with the right
00:07:08.000are being sold into the left. So why doesn't the left care about censorship anymore? Censorship
00:07:13.000is not even a modern right-wing quality. This is 19th century, earlier kind of stuff. But
00:07:22.000now it seems that the left is quite, in fact is often seeking the government to do more
00:07:28.000and more censorship of inappropriate information and so on.
00:07:52.000One of the people you just mentioned, the Iraq War, I mean Tony Blair was just at Davos talking about worldwide mandated vaccine passports, so that kind of shows where the left have come to in terms of, you know, vaccine passports and freedom of speech.
00:08:05.000The common thread I think is authoritarianism, and authoritarianism has been sold into the, certainly the left establishment, Looking at the pandemic, the people who are really affected, everyone talks about being locked up at home, a lot of people weren't locked up at home, a lot of people were working.
00:08:26.000Nurses, teachers, the binmen, the postmen, a lot of people were still working and who was advocating for them?
00:08:33.000I think there's a lot of the left that was left adrift during the pandemic and unfortunately because of The some of the institutions of the left being enamored with this with the promise of authoritarianism as saving lives and all of this kind of thing.
00:08:49.000A lot of people were then funneled towards more right wing groups.
00:08:55.000So, for example, I'm aware that there was a right wing workers union that was trying to scoop up some of the nurses around vaccine mandates.
00:09:05.000Many of those nurses are migrant nurses that actually that right-wing union believes don't have a right to be here.
00:09:11.000There is a distinction between right and left but the authoritarianism has seeped into both sides and that's why I think you do need a non-partisan group like Big Brother Watch that and you know voices like yours that without fear or favor will criticize in a non-partisan way that authoritarianism.
00:09:28.000In a sense, Suki, what I'm saying is that centralised power has become about authoritarianism and only uses the tropes that used to be associated with the left as an aesthetic to distract from the fact that their true agenda is precisely the authoritarianism.
00:09:41.000And Gareth's point about Tony Blair ultimately being a globalist emergent in the era of Clinton, which is precisely the point where both, to a degree, the Democrat Party and certainly the Labour Party in this country Dissolved their traditional relationship with both the union movement, but I think even in a sort of a more diffuse way, the ideological connection to what I would call ordinary working people and became essentially elitist parties.
00:10:07.000We're seriously comfortable with people becoming fabulously wealthy.
00:10:11.000That's sort of like part of my major concern.
00:10:13.000So this whistleblower, Silky, I was about to say, who is it?
00:10:17.000That's the one thing you can't tell us.
00:10:18.000But should we have a look at this bit of footage together and tell us what the process is of getting a bit of information like this, obviously while protecting the source.
00:10:27.000How did this, how did you get this interview and everything that you can tell us that isn't sensitive or dangerous?
00:10:45.000The Whistleblower, yes, was part of the 77th Brigade of the British Army, which is an elite information ops, non-lethal, psychological warfare kind of unit within the army.
00:11:00.000That claims, as you would hope, to only do operations overseas.
00:11:05.000And what the whistleblower told us is actually they were doing general searches of social media that without doubt meant that they were monitoring and then flagging up central government Brits, people on their own soil.
00:11:20.000In terms of how we came to meet this whistleblower, it's pure synchronicity actually.
00:11:26.000The universe works in mysterious ways.
00:11:29.000We were doing this investigation about other units within government and didn't tell anyone and the whistleblower came to us at the same time.
00:11:38.000Should we have a look at some of this interview?
00:11:41.000It became very much a kind of monitoring sentiment.
00:11:45.000I did think the voice should sound like that.
00:11:49.000We were so worried, because a voice is a biometric.
00:13:45.000We've done endless freedom of information requests, parliamentary questions.
00:13:49.000You know, as it stands, this unit denied it was even doing this kind of work.
00:13:53.000So, you know, I think this will go on and these are the questions that they have to answer.
00:13:58.000Why did they want to have records of this stuff?
00:14:01.000In the context of what we know as a result of the Twitter file revelations, having someone in essentially a special forces position reveal that this kind of investigation and process is taking place is further evidence that governments around the world are collaborating presumably with big tech and are attempting to control the narrative around the pandemic.
00:14:20.000And that in itself is a demonstration that there's a kind of presumed parentalism between the governing and the governed, that it's not a sort of And what can we do for you?
00:14:30.000How can we help you during this pandemic that they are interested in exerting control and management of power?
00:14:35.000It sounds eerily similar to post 9-11 when we were told that, you know, the US, I guess, army in their case, or secret services, were told that they were using the abilities and technology they had to spy on people abroad, but they're actually using it to spy on their own populations.
00:14:50.000It sounds like that's exactly what you're saying.
00:14:52.000In fact, we brought a legal challenge after the Snowden revelations about when government said that they were doing overseas interception of basically all electronic communications.
00:15:04.000What they meant was that they were tapping cables that got everything.
00:15:07.000And so the facts that, you know, the whole domestic population was being surveilled was just like collateral.
00:15:14.000And it's the same here, from what the whistleblower is telling us, is that just English language communications were being monitored, and without a doubt that will have included British people.
00:15:27.000Then the records are being sent up to central government, and we know that they have a trusted flagger status, so absolutely what they're most likely doing with these records, in fact we know They've said on record all the time that they are flagging this stuff to the social media companies.
00:15:43.000So we don't know what they flagged, but part of their function with these reports is to go to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and say, you might want to have a look at this.
00:15:53.000You know, not we're telling you to take it down, but the kind of like mafia style, like you might want to think about this stuff that's on your platform and do something about it.
00:16:04.000One of the things that the Twitter files demonstrated is that there was an ideological convergence of interests around, for example, the Hunter Biden story that meant that it wasn't even entirely necessary to instruct in an authoritative way that the information had to be removed because there was, broadly speaking, an ideological alliance.
00:16:25.000And one of the guests we had on the show, I think it was Michael Schellenberger, suggested that journalists are taken to briefings where they're told, "Oh,
00:16:34.000you might want to watch out for Russian disinformation." And so they might do stories, I
00:16:38.000don't know, about people's laptops so that when this information appears, they're already primed.
00:16:43.000And I suppose what this suggests is more broadly to have a sort of a macro look at it for a
00:16:49.000moment, is that the government offering, the idea that the government there is there to
00:16:55.000protect you rather than to control you is challenged by these kind of revelations.
00:17:01.000That's what I continually get from it, whether it's, as you say, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, in order to protect you, we must do this.
00:17:08.000And then when you have the lens that, oh, I see what's happening, They need to be in control of us.
00:17:14.000I know it sounds sort of somewhat grandiose and hyperbolic, but sometimes I think it's necessary to frame things in that way so that people recognize that what's happening is not some sort of anemic, drab, bureaucratic narrative.
00:17:27.000We're talking about our ability to freely communicate.
00:17:30.000We're talking about democracy being a theatrical affair.
00:17:33.000Rather than the legitimate execution of the will of the people.
00:17:37.000And all of these things direct me to the need for radical, systemic change.
00:17:42.000And I know that you're at the end of this, where it requires, I'm assuming, really laborious processes of requesting freedom of information.
00:17:51.000when we spoke to Open the Books, is it Gal, in the US, you can see that this is like a kind of a legal,
00:17:57.000loyally, difficult, intrepid, intransigent process that requires devotion.
00:18:03.000And all of us have got little roles to play.
00:18:05.000And I feel that when we're dealing with information, what we're trying to do is alert people to deception,
00:18:11.000alert people to the true nature of power, encourage people to look for alliances
00:18:16.000when it comes to those traditional categories of left and right, traditional, progressive,
00:18:20.000because we are being confronted with, as this story demonstrates, Silke,
00:18:24.000a sort of almost unparalleled capacity to exert power due to the nature of technology
00:18:30.000and the willingness of governments to abuse it.
00:18:32.000I'll just jump in because I think around that you were saying that a lot of this came through around the pandemic and obviously a lot of the Twitter files are being exposed at the moment about coming through the pandemic and obviously it's a very polarised time and the subject was very polarised but when you say Silky that these departments are being kept in place now and for the future They're going to get used for all sorts of things, and a prime example at the moment is the Ukraine war, or future wars, a war with China.
00:18:58.000And now you're getting to the point where you can eliminate dissent around those, around people pointing out ways in which money is spent, whether that's helping Ukraine, or militarising Ukraine, or whatever it is.
00:19:09.000You're getting to a point, I think there was a report recently around the Twitter files
00:19:12.000that the government in the US was also white labelling, I think is the phrase, certain
00:19:19.000foreign activity of theirs that they wanted to promote.
00:19:23.000We're doing these things in these countries and to again, eliminate any kind of dissent
00:21:14.000I want a tax rebate if they're not spying on me.
00:21:18.000Some of the stuff that they were interested in.
00:21:20.000They were interested in anyone with an audience, anyone who was criticising government policies around this time.
00:21:27.000Even on my tweets, they're looking at how many people it reached, how many thousand likes, interactions, all this kind of stuff.
00:21:35.000Also, Gareth, when you said it's a contentious subject, a contentious subject in terms of the pandemic, that there are different opinions, but the contentiousness in fact is part of the framing, that's part of what was created.
00:21:50.000It ought never have been, it ought always have been.
00:21:52.000This is a medical situation that we appear to be dealing with.
00:21:55.000It seems that we might be able to get a vaccine.
00:22:28.000He said that in 2001, as much information was conveyed in In that one year as in the previous all human history in one year and the second year doubled that so that he said that when you look at it on a graph it looks like a tidal wave and it's causing a kind of tectonic shift so like or in a sense it feels to me that what are I'm being careful how I say this but almost there's a sense that situations are welcomed if not engineered that
00:22:54.000Legitimise authoritarianism because in a new landscape, there is a bigger requirement for authority because people can communicate, counter-narratives can appear.
00:23:03.000Anything any of us say, opposing views, can just spring up in the chat.
00:23:07.000Immediately, let us know in the chat what you think about that.
00:23:12.000I just throw this away, I don't even like it.
00:23:15.000Do you know, I think one thing that I sort of hope comes from all of this is that maybe we shouldn't be careful about what we say.
00:23:22.000I mean, obviously, if you've got a massive platform, then you probably need to be more careful than the average person, but individuals should not be too careful about what they say.
00:23:30.000I think we've entered an era where everyone fills up with their social media platforms.
00:23:34.000They're kind of like their own PR manager and they have to be really careful and think about future employers and this, that and the other.
00:23:39.000And actually, in a free society and in a democracy, And especially if we're all ultimately trying to find truths and make things better, you have to accommodate error, you have to get things wrong, you have to look in every corner, and you have to explore all kinds of thoughts, and you have to make mistakes.
00:24:49.000Things didn't used to be like that, and it seems that there's a necessity to generate that kind of tension in order to facilitate censorship and authoritarianism, not because of a true morality.
00:24:59.000Because if there was a true principle at play, then the position wouldn't shift in the way that it has, in the way that earlier in the conversation we talked about censorship, Silky, that would have once been assumed to have been a liberal issue.
00:25:11.000If you care about freedom, of course you care about freedom of speech.
00:25:13.000Yeah, that central, some of these core principles that define democracy, it's the foundation of democracy, have suddenly been recast as a threat to democracy and a threat to society.
00:25:26.000Free speech is often talked about as though it's this kind of dangerous animal that has to be controlled and it's really strange.
00:25:34.000So I think we should, part of the pushback, obviously we're going to do We've got a big campaign launching.
00:25:40.000We're going to want people to sign the petition.
00:25:42.000Go to bigbrotherwatch.org.uk to take part.
00:25:46.000But also, you know, we should all just speak more freely and be tolerant of people, other people who we disagree with.
00:25:55.000I think particularly during COVID, The idea that there was a set right and wrong was obviously nonsense because everything was new and all these different views about, even if it's about efficacy of vaccines and vaccine passports and lockdown and modelling, all the things that they were monitoring and seeking to control, as we found in our report,
00:26:16.000There was no agreed on answers to these questions, but people weren't allowed to explore, and even members of parliament, the people that represent us in our democracy, and even the experts.
00:26:30.000One of the people who's in these reports is Carl Hennigan, Professor Carl Hennigan.
00:27:32.000Not just for the units, but also for the contracts that they're giving to AI companies, some of which have links to government ministers, to outsource some of this work.
00:27:42.000We've probably even paid for that red hoodie.
00:27:44.000Even in our presentation today, we showed how top level organisations from around the world, whether it's the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, were all discussing the possibility of Three origins for the coronavirus, bioengineering, lab leak, natural origin.
00:28:04.000The fact that they settled on natural origin, censored alternative theories, we know that that was one of the ideas that was subject to censorship, even though there was no legitimacy to that censorship and it was something that should have been discussed.
00:28:15.000That is authoritarianism, that is parentalism, it's undue censorship and I think that your story really advances, demonstrates that this has been taking place because we're being gaslit on a global scale now, it's like it wasn't happening.
00:29:53.000To have power over what people can say and what people can read and hear is the most extraordinary power imaginable.
00:30:00.000That's why we called our report Ministry of Truth.
00:30:02.000It is like the Orwellian idea of the Ministry of Truth.
00:30:07.000It's information control on a mass scale.
00:30:10.000So yeah, I think we've seen from the Twitter files that the US government was involved in similar things.
00:30:16.000We have to have a proper conversation about misinformation.
00:30:19.000Misinformation at the moment is basically this vague, nebulous, wrong information category that in the hands of government will mean information that's not flattering to them, information that's not convenient to them, information that opposes their policies.
00:30:32.000The problem that I have with these type of revelations is they help to kind of bolster my more pathological sense that you just cannot trust authority and that your starting point is oppose, assume they're lying, start there.
00:30:48.000And that in itself comes with problems.
00:30:52.000Certainly it means I get a lot of parking tickets.
00:30:55.000Are there any other revelations to come?
00:30:57.000For example, I've sometimes had concerns around the use of the NHS branding around the tracking app, because the NHS National Health Service in this country is sort of a beautiful service of free healthcare built on the backs of the war dead, and obviously on our taxis to this day.
00:31:15.000I wonder if there are any revelations to come around the curating, controlling, sharing of private biometric data?
00:31:25.000Well, in terms of around these units, there's got to be more revelations to come because there are so many unanswered questions.
00:31:32.000Parliament needs to open inquiries into what they were doing.
00:31:36.000Like you say, it's all publicly funded.
00:32:47.000People were lied to, people were controlled, and mistakes were made.
00:32:52.000Obviously people had good intentions in government, but you can't own that trust unless you've really earned it.
00:32:59.000So they've got to come clean about all of this.
00:33:02.000If people are going to trust that what happens under the misinformation and disinformation banner is actually benefiting democracy rather than harming it, which is what I think we've seen here.
00:33:16.000You trusted your intuition and we have been hopefully of some service in helping to verify your intuitive understanding of the corruption at the heart of centralised authoritarian governments the world over and the nature of their collaboration.
00:33:29.000They're spying and they're, I'm going to say, skullduggery.
00:33:32.000Silky, thanks so much for joining us today.
00:33:34.000You've been a fantastic guest as always.
00:33:36.000Let us know how we can support your ongoing brilliant work.