British 77th Brigade spied on COVID19 critics, politicians and journalists

It turns out that the 77th Brigade, a clandestine unit of the British military apparatus, has been spying on British citizens critical of COVID-19 pandemic policies, from lockdowns to mass vaccination schemes, reports a civil liberty nonprofit Big Brother Watch in partnership with The Mail on Sunday.

Part of the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade, the group purportedly has targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who dared question the COVID-19 narrative.

Big Brother Watch accumulated the evidence and shared it with the mainstream “middle-market tabloid” news daily, founded in 1896—The Mail.

The duo report that military intelligence directed intelligence gathering initiatives, including comprehensive dossiers of critics such as David Davis, an ex-ministry who questioned how health authorities were modeling the death toll projections.

Other official military intelligence targets were journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young, who expressed dissenting views.

Why, under the auspices of fighting “misinformation,” are such sophisticated military spying operations turned on the domestic population during the pandemic?

How was this exposed?

According to The Mail piece, Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties group, shared proprietary journalistic research exposing groups such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, as well as the Rapid Response Unit affiliate with the Cabinet Office. Just in May, the group procured a £75,000 social listening tool to track Britain’s population online.

British 77th Army Brigade - Spied on COVID19 critics

Big Brother Watch Entry

Reporting that “secretive Whitehall units” are on the prowl, spying on COVID-19 dissent under cover of “tackling misinformation,” the civil liberties group in the UK reports politicians, academics, activists, and journalists, and even regular citizens have been spied on by Whitehall officials, part of an “information warfare machine” in the British Army.

What are key Findings?

The nonprofit groups reports:

• Anti-fake news units in the Cabinet Office and DCMS spent much of their time monitoring social media for political dissent under the guise of “counter-disinformation” work.

• Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer, Conservative MPs David Davis & Chris Green, journalists including Peter Hitchens and Julia Hartley-Brewer, and academics from the University of Oxford and University College London all had comments critical of the government recorded by the anti-fake news units.

• Soldiers from the Army’s 77th Brigade collated tweets from British citizens about Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic and passed them to the Cabinet Office. Troops also conducted “sentiment analysis” about the government’s Covid-19 response.

• The Rapid Response Unit [Cabinet Office] pressured a Whitehall department to attack newspapers for publishing articles analyzing Covid-19 modeling that it feared would “affect compliance” with pandemic restrictions.

• RRU staff featured Conservative MPs, activists, and journalists in “vaccine hesitancy reports” for opposing vaccine passports.

• The Counter Disinformation Unit [DCMS] has a special relationship with social media companies it uses to recommend content be removed. Third-party contractors trawled Twitter for perceived terms of service violations and passed them to CDU officials.

• Front organizations aimed at minority communities were set up by the Research, Communications, and Intelligence Unit [Home Office] to spread government propaganda in the UK.

Is a “Ministry of Truth” like what would be experienced under the former Soviet Union now readily spying on dissenting speech associated with COVID-19?

It certainly looks like this is the case in this bombshell revelation. Under the façade of taking on “fake news,” a far more nefarious effort involving various defense-related groups continues to conduct large-scale monitoring of the British public on social media.

SOURCE