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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

Was any collusion proven in court? Because if not, this feels a lot like the House Un-American Activities Committee, aka McCarthyism. This was historically settled as the definition of government overreach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

> I suppose a liberty-minded individual would suggest that a private entity should not collude with the government, if it wants to avoid government oversight.

I look forward to the endless oversight panels on intel contractors, which I am truly afraid to name, because that will happen as well, right?

Please note that afaik, Stanford's Internet Observatory was not a government contractor.

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As described in the article, all that happened were subpoenas for documents. That's the very first step in any investigation. Those documents have shed significant light on the relationship between the SIO and government agencies [0]:

> Led by former CIA fellow Renee DiResta, the Virality Project functioned as an intermediary for government censorship. Ties between the US government and the academic research center were extremely close. DHS had “fellows” embedded at the Stanford Internet Observatory, while SIO had interns embedded at CISA, and former DHS staff contributed to the Virality Project’s final report.

> The Virality Project also had contact with the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General, described the CDC as a “partner” in its design documents, and the California Department of Public Health had a login to access the Jira content flagging system, as did CISA personnel.

It sure seems like SIO was acting as a government contractor/agent here, if it was providing services to the government in exchange for funding.

[0] - https://brownstone.org/articles/the-virality-projects-censor...

I am very thankful that you introduced me to the type of people who just took down the highly respected folks at Stanford. I did not realize that this is what had happened.

I now realize that I am on the wrong side of a previous wave function collapse, and I might be living in the dumbest possible branch of the multiverse.

Here is what I just learned about brownstone.org:

> Newly obtained internal emails from the Brownstone Institute reveal support for child labor and underage cigarette smoking at the COVID-19 misinformation dark money group.

https://www.importantcontext.news/p/leaked-brownstone-instit...

Please watch this deeply whackadoo insanity, from Jeffery Tucker, the founder of Brownstone:

> schoolsucksproject.com

> If you could earn money from the ages of 12 to 16...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUQpfalF-iM

This has been up on the School Sucks YT channel for 11 years. It was not taken down. Jeffery Tucker still believes in this.

My take is that the guy is nuts and I will never trust anything that he ever promotes. After watching this, do you?

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