Free Republic

Donald Trump and Angela Merkel now agree about the main issues in U.S.-German relations. “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are a way past us,” Merkel told a beer-tent rally of her political party. “We Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands.” That is just what President Trump has been telling the Europeans since the beginning of last year’s U.S. election campaign, demanding in particular that Europe pay more for its own defense. Both Trump and Merkel, moreover, say they want the euro to strengthen against the U.S. dollar. That...

LIVING IN EAST Germany during the Cold War meant being watched. By your government. By your neighbors. And even, at times, by your own family. The East German secret police, one of the most intrusive and oppressive spying operations ever assembled, collected millions of files on people it suspected of being enemies of the state. The German Democratic Republic dissolved in 1990 with the fall of communism, but the documents assembled by the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, remain. This massive archive includes 69 miles of shelved documents, 1.8 million images, and 30,300 video and audio recordings housed in...

The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of "nasty, mean ideas" on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday. Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his intention in building it had been for the public to "do good stuff" and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia. Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying....

Germany's justice minister is proposing fines of up to 50 million euros ($53 million) for social networking sites that fail to swiftly remove illegal content, such as hate speech or defamatory "fake news." The plan announced Tuesday marks a further step in Germany's attempt to impose its strict domestic laws against incitement on the free-wheeling world of online chatter. Justice Minister Heiko Maas, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, said social media companies had already taken voluntary steps to crack down on hate crimes that have resulted in improvements. "This isn't sufficient yet," Maas said, citing research that...

Germany is taking on Facebook, threatening criminal action against the world’s biggest social media company if it doesn’t stem the swelling tide of racist postings. Entries such as “gas the Jews” are examples of the repugnant postings... , said ... spokesman for the German Ministry of Justice. “Facebook doesn’t [react] unless they get complaints, or don’t remove it fast enough,”... “...is not just racist comment, it is a violation of Germany’s criminal code,” he said. “Facebook can be held criminally liable for users’ illegal hate speech.” German law prohibits speech that denies the Holocaust, disparages minorities, or insults public figures....

After the German Interior Minister put forth a bold plan on Tuesday to centralize the country’s security apparatus, conservative leaders at the state level have hit back. Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer on Wednesday categorically rejected Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière’s plan to increase federal powers in domestic security. Germany’s domestic intelligence services are currently decentralized, divided between the federal government and the 16 individual state governments. But de Maizière wants to move the states’ powers to Berlin under the federal BfV intelligence service. […] Hesse interior minister Peter Beuth, CDU, called the reform plans “nonsense” and said such swift moves...

The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.

An organisation run by a former Stasi agent has been recruited by the German government to patrol Facebook in a bid to stamp out “xenophobic” comments. Those caught posting material that the government disagrees with are likely to face criminal prosecution. Germany is set to welcome one million new immigrants this year, a move that has not been without controversy. Determined to see his fellow Germans embrace their new multicultural homeland, Justice Minister Heiko Maas has decided to crack down on those citizens who criticise the influx, especially those who take to their own private Facebook accounts to do so....

The German Interior Ministry has announced its intention to combat so-called “fake news” on social media by setting up a “defence centre against disinformation,” ahead of next year’s federal election. . . . The enforcement of so-called hate speech laws online has also had a direct impact on the lives of many ordinary Germans. Raids have been carried out by police across the country on homes of those suspected to have written negative comments online about asylum seekers which have led to fines and even prison sentences.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has confirmed plans to rapidly expand the scope and size of Germany’s intelligence services including its domestic spy agency. Citing cyber attacks and the ongoing situations in Syria and Ukraine, the German Chancellor made the case that the intelligence agencies must cooperate with each other and with their international counterparts to counter what she believes are new threats to Germany, reports Die Presse.

Right, Donny. Because who could ever come up with an argument against Hillary Clinton, possibly the most corrupt, scandal-ridden, jaded candidate in the history of presidential politics? On today’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough, to his credit, fulminated against anti-Trump MSM reporters who are supposed to write stories down the middle but are instead “openly cheering for Hillary Clinton.” That’s when Donny Deutsch defended media bias, saying that reporters have a “conscience” and that “sometimes there’s no other side to an argument.” View the video here.

In their biggest threat yet to conservative media, Democrats on the Federal Election Commission are laying the groundwork to bar companies with even the tiniest foreign ownership from American politics, a move that could ban Fox, the Wall Street Journal and even the New York Times from covering political races or giving endorsements. In a last-minute submission Wednesday, a top Democrat on the evenly split FEC proposed that the Thursday meeting of the commission begin the process to prohibit companies with foreign ownership as small as 5 percent "from funding expenditures, independent expenditures, or electioneering communications." Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub...

Can police prevent hate crimes by monitoring racist banter on social media? Researchers will be testing this concept over the next three years in Los Angeles, marking a new frontier in efforts by law enforcement to predict and prevent crimes. During a three-year experiment, British researchers working with the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. will be monitoring millions of tweets related to the L.A. area in an effort to identify patterns and markers that prejudice-motivated violence is about to occur in real time. The researchers then will compare the data against records of reported violent acts. The U.S. Department of Justice...

More from the article - interview mp4 available at link. On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton predicted that the impending transfer of Internet domain control from American supervision to an international body will mean the end of the Internet “as we know it.” Speaking to Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, Bolton explained that we should be “very concerned” about the transfer from “a national-security perspective.” “What we’ve gotten out of the Internet, under the shelter of a private American organization that contracts with the Commerce Department, [is] one of the few cases...

US film director Oliver Stone on Thursday accused President Barack Obama's administration of implementing a surveillance system worse than that of the feared Stasi secret police in East Germany. Speaking at the San Sebastian film festival in northern Spain, where he presented his film "Snowden," Stone said many in the US had grown disillusioned with a president they once saw as "a man of great integrity." "On the contrary, Obama has doubled down on the (George W.) Bush administration policies," said Stone, whose latest movie is a biographical political thriller about Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who revealed a...

One expert witness, Paul Rosenzweig, predicts fireworks during the First Panel: "I will be testifying as well, but on the second panel—the fireworks will be on the first panel, I'm sure." The first panel will include many in favor of multinational oversight for ICANN, and the questioning will likely get hot. While many in congress trust President Obama's plan, Paul Rosenzweig noted: "The Chairmen of the four relevant committees (Senate and House, Judiciary and Commerce), however, have called for the administration to reconsider its decision." ** Get that -- ALL FOUR chairmen [who are most informed about the controversy], and...

A political action committee is looking to figure out whether it can safely use the Internet to support national political candidates, or whether the Federal Election Commission might seize the opportunity to impose the kind of regulations Democrats have been striving to attain. The request for an advisory opinion, filed on behalf of Citizen Super PAC, asks the FEC whether it would be permissible to email supporters of a candidate's campaign, or whether that would cross a line prohibiting coordination with candidates.

Some of Britain’s best-loved and most watched programmes, including EastEnders and Coronation Street, are to be monitored for their ethnic, gender and sexual orientation diversity as part of a new scheme to be rolled out eventually across the whole of British television.

According to a press release provided to The Daily Caller, Terence Burke, senior vice president of national news, said that “CNN’s cutting-edge development of technology to enhance the way we tell stories is a part of our DNA. We are proud to continue the tradition with CNN AIR, and to establish a unit that will expand our technological capabilities for newsgathering.” CNN has formed the “first media-related research partnership with the Georgia Tech Research Institute” and will be in a direct research agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration. According to the press release, in 2015, “CNN was selected by the...

London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, is allocating over two million dollars (£1,730,726) to an “online hate crime hub” enabling police to track and arrest “trolls” who “target…individuals and communities.” There can be no doubt, given the nature of the British political establishment today, which “trolls” these new Thought Police will be going after, and which “communities” will be protected from “hate speech.” “Islamophobia,” which David Horowitz and I termed “the thought crime of the totalitarian future,” is now going to bring down upon the hapless “trolls” the wrath of London’s Metropolitan police force -- and this totalitarian new initiative...