The Effortpost's Graveyard

Original post Okay, we left off the last post around 2002. This was a really busy time for the internet in the UK. Ofcom had just formed, and as I mentioned in the last post, had no real remit to regulate the content of the internet. The Internet Watch Foundation, funded by the UK ISP industry, is starting to take on that mantle - the ISPs realised that the internet was effectively unregulatable on either a technical or legislative basis. And the government, surprisingly, is mostly agreeing with them.

Original post Author's note - there are a couple of factual errors here but they don't really affect the actual thrust, ahem, of the post. I've also taken the opportunity to tidy up some of the formatting, but CBA actually properly copy-editing it.   Anyway, like all good smut there's quite a few moving parts involved here - a turf war between Ofcom and the BBFC, Tories attempting to rile up their base, and the constant jostling between the largest telcos in the UK (BT, Sky, Virgin, EE, O2, and Vodafone), with of course pressure groups on all sides throwing morsels at hacks that should probably know a lot better.

Original post As for the stuff on Rees-Mogg and the far right... well, strap yourself in, because this is going to be a wild ride. Some (or much) of this you may well know already, but I think it deserves being put down in one place to show off the underlying patterns. This Friday, he met with Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon to discuss political campaigning strategies. Yes, that’s Steve Bannon the former ‘chief strategist’ (a position created entirely for him) of Donald Trump, who got kicked out of the White House after a number of strategic errors including undermining his boss on North Korea and – perhaps more significantly – encouraging Trump into his disastrously ambivalent response to the Charlottesville race riot.

Original post The Bannon Connection As I mentioned, Rees-Mogg met with Steve Bannon of Breitbart and Nigel Farage of UKIP last year. All three are prominent figures on the far-right with connections to Russia, as I laid out in my previous e-mail. It’s now emerged that the links between UKIP and Russian agents were even deeper than has been hitherto revealed. A Daily Beast article from May last year detailed the close relationship between UKIP and the hacker group Wikileaks , who appear to have been entirely subverted by Russia and played an instrumental role in the US elections. The article discusses internal UKIP memos which revealed that UKIP consulted with Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, on speeches the party gave to the European Parliament, that they attempted to send UKIP members to artificially generate protests when Assange appeared in court in London for extradition on rape charges, and that Farage and other senior members of the party met extensively with Assang