[Hot Air] The Sunday Mail lifted the lid—a bit—on how the COVID "emergency" prompted the government to expand domestic surveillance on politicians, journalists, and ordinary UK citizens—using their military psyops Brigade.In effect, the program was a military operation targeting domestic dissidents, although from what we know the military component was using surveillance technology, while whatever active measures were taken to manipulate information were taken through other channels. Most of those measures remain shrouded in mystery.
A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Military operatives in the UK’s ’information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.
They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No 10.
The tale is troubling—for obvious reasons—and made even more so by the revelation that there was little pretense about rooting out foreign cyber operations. It was straight up targeting domestic skeptics of government COVID policies. In the US, the intelligence community concocted take tales of foreign-directed cells to justify their efforts to monitor and censor Americans, accusing average Americans of being Russian bots. The blossoming "Hamilton 68″scandal is clearly part of this effort, in which a 3rd party cutout was used by the intelligence community to justify silencing dissent.
In the UK the excuse was Chinese cyber operations. However, the 77th Brigade (psyops) didn’t actually target Chinese-linked propaganda, but dissenting politicians and journalists. Anybody who questioned government policy was monitored, and the surveillance was forwarded to the Prime Minister’s office for further action.
The revelations come via a UK civil liberties watchdog called "Big Brother Watch." They used whistleblower accounts and government transparency laws to cobble together the information. Their key findings were:
Related: WIRED - Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine. They are soldiers, but the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts. Welcome to the age of information warfare