{"id":6391,"date":"2010-01-15T17:32:30","date_gmt":"2010-01-16T01:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/2010\/01\/obama-confidants-spine-chilling-proposal\/"},"modified":"2010-01-15T17:32:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T01:32:30","slug":"obama-confidants-spine-chilling-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/2010\/01\/obama-confidants-spine-chilling-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama confidant&#8217;s spine-chilling proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-content\/upload\/2010\/01\/md_horiz.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" alt=\"md_horiz.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/news\/opinion\/glenn_greenwald\/2010\/01\/15\/sunstein\">\n<p>(updated below &#8211; Update II &#8211; Update III)<\/p>\n<p>Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama&#8217;s closest confidants.&nbsp;&nbsp;Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama&#8217;s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for &#8220;overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.&#8221; In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-&#8220;independent&#8221; advocates to &#8220;cognitively infiltrate&#8221; online groups and websites &#8212; as well as other activist groups &#8212; which advocate views that Sunstein deems &#8220;false conspiracy theories&#8221; about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens&#8217; faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper&#8217;s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.<\/p>\n<p>[From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/news\/opinion\/glenn_greenwald\/2010\/01\/15\/sunstein\" ><cite>Glenn Greenwald &#8211; Salon.com<\/cite><\/a>]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(updated below &#8211; Update II &#8211; Update III) Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama&#8217;s closest confidants.&nbsp;&nbsp;Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama&#8217;s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for &#8220;overseeing policies relating to privacy, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/2010\/01\/obama-confidants-spine-chilling-proposal\/\"  class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Obama confidant&#8217;s spine-chilling proposal<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4RRl-1F5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattcastille.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}