In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of "Sovereignty in the Information Age." The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.
This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.
[...] The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. "Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important.... In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public's increased trust in them as institutions."
But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should "consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item," while social media companies should "use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants" to rate their users' political statements.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/05/pers-o05.html
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:53PM
With or without court sanctions, regardless of it being public, closed doors or secretive, its own citizens or foreigners, at wartime or during peace, on its own soil or abroad, Britain been executing terrorists and the like for decades. Sometimes its using intelligence agents. Sometimes its by ordering shoot-to-kill. Sometimes its by opening fire on civilian infrastructure during wartime under suspicion of collaboration... The term "execution" simply means someone in government gave the order to kill and it was carried out through the chain of command by this or that branch. The reason it's muddled is because there laws and treaties meant to limit these that the US and Britain been trying to avoid since Agincourt.
It's a long, infamous tradition.